Klan Camp

0:01Speaker 1:Cool Zone Media. The sun was already starting to set by the time the couple pulled up outside of their apartment on November sixth, nineteen eighty seven. This trip to Mexico had initially been pitched to Sheila as a honeymoon, but they'd been staying in this little xpac community outside of Guadalajara for more than six months. She was young and in love, and she'd adjusted easily to her new role as the stepmother to her husband's seven year old daughter from a prior marriage, but she was so terribly worried about crime. She and her husband just didn't trust Mexicans, so they rarely strayed beyond the boundaries of their little neighborhood of white Americans. That evening, Sheila went straight inside and started bustling around the kitchen, preparing to get started on making dinner. With the groceries just picked up. She was standing at the scenk looking out the kitchen window to see what was taking her husband so long when she saw her worst fear. A gang of Mexican bandits was assaulting her husband. They were holding him face down on the hood of the car at gunpoint. At least that's what she told a Mexican judge she thought she

1:23Speaker 1:saw through the window. She claimed the officers with the Mexican Federal Police never identified themselves. She never would have fired on them if she'd known they were police officers, and maybe the judge believed her, or maybe they just wanted to be rid of her. She spent just ten days in a Mexican jail before all of her charges were dropped. The officer she'd shot three times in the torso was still in the hospital in critical condition. When Sheila was deported back to the United States, she rejoined her husband, who was being held on some very serious federal charges. That's why they'd been hiding out in Mexico.

2:10Speaker 1:It wasn't an extended honeymoon. Her husband was on the FBI's most wanted list. Of course, Louis Beane was no stranger to a courtroom, and he would end up wriggling his way out of those sedition charges in nineteen eighty eight, just like he always did. Nothing ever, seemed to stick to him, not even that time. He hosted a boy scout camp where his klansmen taught teenage boys how to decapitate communists. I'm Molly Conger, and this is weird, little guys.

2:51Speaker 1:A lot of what we know about what was happening on Lewis Bem's paramilitary training compound outside Houston comes for a lawsuit that was filed in nineteen eighty one. The suit was filed by the Vietnamese Fishermen's Association against Lewis Bean and his Texas Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. By the late nineteen seventies, there were significant communities of Vietnamese refugees and immigrants who had settled in the Gulf Coast area. The climate was similar and there were opportunities there for fishing and crabbing, which was how many of those refugees had fed their families back home in Vietnam before the war. The story of the Texas clans war with the fishermen comes later, though. But if the Klan being weird near Galveston was sounding familiar to you, that's probably why the clans escalating confrontations and threats against the fishermen and the subsequent lawsuit are what made that compound famous, and the injunction in that lawsuit is what ultimately shut the camp down and made Lewis Bean so bad that he left Texas entirely for a while, but that didn't really get going until nineteen eighty one, and locals knew

4:21Speaker 1:what was going on at that camp in the fall of nineteen eighty. You see, sometimes I just want to tell you guys one funny little anecdote, but I can't just drop you off in the middle of a guy's life. You would have so many questions about how we got there. But it's summertime. A lot of you have kids who aren't in school this month. Maybe you've got them signed up for some kind of camp, some educational program. Maybe they're going to spend some time out in nature, learn some new skills, make some new friends. And this seasonal shift reminded me of the time a bunch of teenage boys got sent off to what their mothers believed was a perfectly normal boy scout camp, only to find out that their sons were being trained for the race war and a clan compound. So we're not going to get the whole picture of Lewis Beam today, but I will at least orient us a little bit before we get into the kid's garrotting lessons. Okay, first of all, I have to start with a confession. I have just now discovered that I've been saying this man's name wrong for a decade and nobody ever said anything to me. I had to take a lap around the apartment, sighing and

5:45Speaker 1:groaning and slamming cabinets. Are you kidding me? Louis Louis Beam, l o U I s that could be Lewis or Louis. You know, say Louis King, Louis Louis Armstrong. I don't know. It could go either way, and I've always said Louis Beam, And now that I'm stressing out about it, I don't know why did I hear someone say that? Or did I just make it up and never check. His name is Louis ray Beam Junior l o UIs, but his father is Louis Raybeams Senior l e Wis. He's named after a guy whose name isn't even spelled the same if they called him junior, so you gotta figure they called the kid Lewis. I didn't want to believe it.

6:43Speaker 1:I hate to be wrong. I'm so embarrassed. Lewis Texas Klansman Louis Beam. Everybody knew this, but me. I don't want to say it that way, but I'll be damned. It turns out there are actually a lot of recordings of this man saying his own name. As someone once told me, Louis, your reputation precedes you. I'm not kidding. I didn't have to look very hard to hear him saying his own name. And I've had this problem before, and it is usually very hard to find a recording of someone saying their own name. So I'll just call Louis Thames name because I take you can't stand the hate and get out of the kitchen. I'm in the kitchen.

7:36Speaker 1:For those of you who haven't figured it out yet, my name's Louis. Bam. Okay, okay, I get it, I get it. You got me, Louis. This has shaken me to my core. I'm tempted to just keep saying Louis. You know sunk cost at this point, But apparently I'm just the only one. I was so desperate to prove that maybe people say it both ways that I found dozens of recordings of people saying his name over the decades. The man himself, his friends, and colleagues, news anchors, an episode of PBS Frontline Professors everybody says Louis. But if you google Louis, beam pronounce, the AI overview says Louis quote pronounced exactly like the name Louis or the French Louis, with the s remaining completely silent. Now, normally I would not admit to even having allowed my eyeballs to pass over the AI overview. I need to figure outw to turn it off because it is not a useful resource.

8:52Speaker 1:But in this case, I was curious what the citation for this is, because there's always a citation. It doesn't mean the information it's pulling is correct or that it has correctly digested it. But it got this from somewhere. And the citation for this is an essay by doctor Lawrence Min Bui Davis, the former curator for the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center. According to doctor Davis, the Vietnamese population in South Texas did call him Louis Bim, and apparently bimb is a sort of vulgar Vietnamese slang term for vagina. So a bunch of old Vietnamese guys were sitting on their fishing boats in the bay talking about their enemy Louis pussy. What a fun piece of cultural history.

9:45Speaker 1:Still never trust the AI overview. I got to figure out how to turn that thing off, because even if you're not trying to use it, it's just there at the top of the page making stuff up. In this case, it was telling me something that had an element of truth to it, and that is a cool story. But by presenting that as the proper pronunciation, no explanation, it erased an extremely specific context, and it was effectively telling me something that is not true. Remember AI does not know anything. AI doesn't do your research for you. But I'm sure you knew that. So I wasn't completely alone in calling him Louis. But I don't have a Vietnamese accent, so I guess I have to start calling him Lewis.

10:33Speaker 1:I could have kept this whole embarrassing digression to myself, but I think we have the kind of relationship that prioritizes honesty, and I wanted to tell you the pussy thing. The second earth shattering revelation I had while I was researching this week came when I found out he's still alive. I genuinely had no idea Lewis being was still. I don't know why, but I assumed he'd been dead for years, like twenty years maybe. I guess they'd mostly think of him as being in his prime in the seventies and eighties, and that was so long ago, you know. He was a key figure in that time period, sort of on the level with guys like William Luther Pierce. And Pierce did die twenty five years ago, but he was significantly older than Beam was. Lewis Beam is, as it turns out, the exact same age as the President, So he'll be turning eighty this summer. He dropped out of the public eye three full decades ago, so I'm sure I wasn't the only one who assumed he was dead. His last public appearance was in nineteen ninety six, around the time he announced that he was retiring after thirty years in the movement so he could spend more time with his family.

11:55Speaker 1:He also blamed his withdrawal on his declining health, which he claimed was due to exposure to agent orange during his service in the Vietnam War. I can't tell you if the aging Klansman really was sick from exposure to the chemical Defolian that the US military sprayed all over Vietnam, but if he just wanted to spend more time with his family, he picked a bad time to do it. A few months after he stepped back from public life to devote himself to his family, he didn't have one anymore.

12:26Speaker 1:His fourth wife, Sheila, the one who'd shot that Mexican police officer for him a decade earlier, filed for divorce in nineteen ninety seven, and the judge granted him very limited access to the couple's two young daughters. His oldest daughter, the one who'd been caught in that shootout in Mexico, was returned to her mother, Beams third wife, Kara, in nineteen eighty seven, after Mexican authority sent the girl home to the US. Her father had abducted her during a custodial disagreement in nineteen eighty two when she was a top That may have played a role in the judge's decision to give Sheila primary custody of the girls in her divorce. The man had a history, but I guess I should have started by telling you what that history was.

13:17Speaker 1:He's come up in passing here and there. It's hard to avoid him, really, if you're talking about the American far right in the seventies and eighties. He was a klansman. Not just any clansman. He was kind of a big deal. He was the architect of the leaderless resistance model of right wing violence in the United States, that cell based structure for terrorist attacks that makes the movement harder to track and harder to stop. This week I returned once again to one of my favorite books, Kathleen BLUs Bring the War Home. I know I've said it before, but it's worth saying again. If you haven't, go ahead and pick up a copy. It really is one of the best books out there on the white power movement in the United States. And not to beat a dead horse, but I did find audio of Kathleen saying his name.

14:12Speaker 1:She says Louis, because that's his name. Honestly, I trust her more than I trust the man himself, so I give up. Nobody says Louis. Her book isn't exactly a biography of Louis Beam, but the modern militant far right in America doesn't really exist without him, so it's as close to one as you're going to find. The title itself, bring the War Home, is a reference to one of Beam's essays in his nineteen eighty three collection Essays of a Klansman. One of the essays is called Vietnam, Bring It On Home. Beam was a Vietnam War veteran, and he wasn't done fighting when he got home. He'd fought for the US government in Vietnam, and now he wanted to wage war against the US government. Lewis Raybeaham Junior was born on August twentieth, nineteen forty six, in Lufkin, Texas.

15:20Speaker 1:And I know I said I was done, meaning a dead horse. But according to the Texas Department of Health Bureau of Vital Statistics, the name on his birth certificate, the name that was recorded with the State of Texas at the time of his birth is Lewis with a W, just like his father's. So I don't know when he started spelling his own name wrong. But okay, I'm done. I'm done. He was the eldest of four children born to Madeleine and Louis Beam Senior. Most sources just skip over his childhood and pick up with his enlistment in the army in nineteen sixty five. The Southern Poverty Law Center is biographical sketch even says that there isn't much known about beams childhood. Obviously, the couple of hours I spent poking around on my computer here in my home office wasn't going to dig up some previously unknown primary source that the experts missed all these years. So I don't have a bombshell for you. I don't have any new information about his childhood, but I did find kind of a fun fact about his conception. Lewis Senior was a soldier to He was in the Army. He was deployed in nineteen forty three, serving in Algeria, France, and Italy.

16:36Speaker 1:He was injured several times over the course of the war and received a bronze star at a purple heart. He attended Officer candidate school in France during the war, and by nineteen forty five he was a lieutenant and in the summer of nineteen forty five he received a new assignment. He was a prison guard at Nuremberg. The Klansman's father was one of the soldiers standing guard over the Nazi war criminals. He met Hermann Gurring in November of nineteen forty five, after thirty three months deployed in the European theater, Lewis Senior was granted a six week furlough to travel home to Texas to see his wife.

17:21Speaker 1:He'd married Madeline in nineteen forty one before he left Texas for the army, but he'd barely seen her since. The Tyler Morning Telegraph ran a story about his visit home, describing what he'd been up to for the last three years. The headline was gurring looks, beaten, morose, avoids meeting eyes of others, reports jail guard from East Texas. Based on Lewis Junior's state of birth, he would have been conceived about halfway through his father's visit home. So maybe some residual Nazi vibes from Nuremberg had transferred directly into him at conception or something. I don't know. Those old local newspapers had one more curious tidbit about Louis's childhood that I hadn't found anywhere else. When he was a junior in high school, his mother shot his father during an argument one evening at home. She shot him once in the stomach with a German made twenty two caliber pistol.

18:36Speaker 1:She was arrested and charged with assault with a deadly weapon. He survived, but the marriage didn't. The divorce was finalized the week of Louis's eighteenth birthday. His three younger siblings were sent to live with their uncle. It doesn't say what happened to Louis. Madeline Beam ended up being tried twice, time ended in a mistrial, but she was ultimately acquitted. In March of nineteen sixty five, a full year after the incident, Lewis seemed to be struggling his senior year of high school. A few months after his mother shot his father, Lewis Junior was arrested on a charge of criminal mischief in some unspecified incident involving throwing a bottle at a house. A few months later, right around the time of his mother's second trial for shooting his father, an eighteen year old Lewis got a sixteen year old girl pregnant. They married shortly after he graduated high school.

19:40Speaker 1:Marilyn Milligan was the first of Lewis Beam's five wives, and the first of three women who would be sixteen years old at the time of their marriage to Beam. He was eighteen the first time, but he kept getting older, and the wives stage sixteen before his first child was even born, Louis Bean was off to the army. Maybe he felt like he didn't have other options. His parents were kind of dealing with their own stuff. It's not even clear where he'd been living when he got his teenage girlfriend pregnant. So he enlisted in the army in September of nineteen sixty five. He just turned nineteen and he had a teenage wife with a baby on the way.

20:29Speaker 1:He was sent to a base in Germany first, but from the spring of nineteen sixty seven to the fall of nineteen sixty eight he spent eighteen months in country. He served as a machine gunner on a helicopter with the twenty fifth Aviation Battalion. By his own account, he quickly grew to enjoy the killing. He was good at it, and his country thanked him for it. He came home a highly decorated veteran, earning a Distinguished Flying Cross, an Army Commendation Medal, and the Air Medal for Heroism. He claims to have killed fifty people during his year and a half in Vietnam. All it did was give him PTSD a taste for killing communists and the best training a future paramilitary commander. Could ever hope for. Not to be clear, he was already racist. Getting a free pass from the US government to shoot Vietnamese people didn't implant the notion of white supremacy in his head. A now deleted website maintained by veterans of the twenty fifth Aviation Battalion shows a photo of a young Lewis Beam posing in his quarters. He's posing in front of a big Confederate flag hanging on the wall in a little thatched hut,

21:51Speaker 1:and the caption reads, all I gotta say is vote for Wallace. He was apparently well known for talking about how much she liked George Wallace, the segregationist running for president in nineteen sixty eight. According to his Essays of a Klansman, he joined the Klan shortly after returning home in nineteen sixty eight. Maybe he joined in sixty nine. Certainly by nineteen seventy he was allegedly already carrying out bombings for the Klan by the beginning of nineteen seventy.

22:28Speaker 1:His own timelines are a little scattered. In Essays of a Klansman, he says he joined the Klan after watching footage of an anti war demonstration on TV. He was sitting at home in Texas, just freshly home from the war, and he watched people that he calls pro Vietcong communist sympathizers picketing outside the Capitol Building in DC, and those demonstrators set an American flag on fire and spat on its ashes. Now, it's unclear if the demonstrators in question were actually Communists or if this is just another instance of a reactionary labeling all of his enemies communists. That is something he specifically did a lot, and I'm not able to tell you with any kind of certainty what day this would have occurred on. There were a lot of demonstrations against the war, and a lot of them featured flag burning. So this may have been a real specific incident, or it may not have, but it represented something that he certainly could have seen on TV. He describes this incident as taking place in the late fall quote one hundred and seven years after Fort Sumter, referring to the battle that started the Civil War in eighteen

23:46Speaker 1:sixty one. So he doesn't say when this happened, but it sounds like he's saying he joined the Klan in the fall of nineteen sixty eight. Although in other writings he describes having joined the movement in April of nineteen sixty nine, but around then, in March of nineteen seventy, he was briefly detained after snatching a flag from a left wing demonstrator at a rally against the draft in Houston. He attacked a member of Students for a Democratic Society and had to be protected by marchers from the Peace Coalition, who escorted him at his request through the crowd towards the police. At the edge of the rally. FBI agents who were there that day were seen photographing the faces and license plates of the marchers who were there to oppose the war in Vietnam, but the police released the violent clansmen without charges. According to an informant, he was one of the klansmen responsible for blowing up a radio station two months later. Later that year, in October of nineteen seventy, Beam was invited to a banquet hosted by Anna Chenault, widow of General Claire Schanalt. Anna Chenault was an influential fundraiser for Richard Nixon, and she gave a

25:04Speaker 1:speech that evening about the importance of continuing the war in Vietnam, and she presented Louis Beam with a Good Citizenship award for his efforts in attacking that peace protester, and just by wave a little bit of background on Anna Chenault. Two years before that banquet, she was involved in Richard Nixon's efforts to sabotage President Johnson's attempts at peace talks. Now, the actual impact of the Chenault affair on the length of the war is a matter of some debate, but it is a historical fact that she was working on Richard Nixon's behalf in an attempt to prolong the war intentionally, so I guess it does make some sense that she was giving out awards for roughing up hippies and peacenicks. Beam wasn't publicly identified as a clansman until he was arrested in nineteen seventy one for a series of bombings that had begun over a year earlier.

26:04Speaker 1:He and more than a dozen other clansmen were indicted on a laundry list of charges, including bombing that radio station and the offices of the Houston area Socialist Workers Party that was a popular target for the time period. If you remember from the Joseph Paul Franklin episodes. That was one of his first bombings as well, and the Socialist Workers Party office in LA was blown up by members of the National Socialist White People's Party, all kind of around this same time period. It was something these guys thought about a lot. And in the case of the bombing in Houston, the defense attorney on that case is someone you might remember from a lot of other stories about unsolved bombings during this time period. Representing one of beams co conspirators was National States Rights Party chairman and serial bomber JB. Stoner. That doesn't go anywhere, but that's a recurring character, So put a pin on the board, and oddly this case disappears. In nineteen seventy one, Lewis Beam is arrested and indicted for a number of bombings.

27:14Speaker 1:There's credible evidence, there are informants. One guy got convicted, but the case against him just kind of never I don't know, there's just nothing, like, there's no record I can find that it went to trial, or that it was dropped, or that a particular reason was given for anything. It just disappears from the news. It's in the news all the time throughout nineteen seventy one. I mean, Beam is testifying for the defense several times and proceedings against his co conspirators, and then there's just no more articles about it ever. Again. Now, granted, I have limited access to archival resources here on my computer at home, but Kathleen Blue's book has a footnote that reads, the details of these cases are not available in the archival material.

28:04Speaker 1:And I know Kathleen looked at all the archival material. So there's just no explanation for this. In the mid nineteen seventies, Lewis Beam changed teams. I mean he was still a clansman, don't get me wrong, but he swapped allegiances. He'd originally joined a Texas chapter of the Alabama based United Clans of America, but he was starting to feel disillusioned. I mean, the group was so heavily infiltrated with informants, and everybody knew it. I mean people say that today about all kinds of things, and a lot of that is just paranoia, but they were right. Cointelbro had done a real number on the UKA. So in nineteen seventy three he struck out on his own. He wanted his own thing, and he called it the Original Ku Klux Klan.

29:03Speaker 1:I wish I was kidding. There was actually already a group in Louisiana called the Original Ku Klux Klan, and he got that guy's permission to use their charter and the name because it was I think, mostly defunct. But he called it the Original Ku Klux Klan, which is a silly name in the first place, and it wasn't even the first group to be called that. But by nineteen seventy five he'd reached an agreement with David Duke to affiliate his organization with Duke's klan group, the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. So you know, normally we're just talking about the Klan. That's three ks. This is four ks. The internal politics of rival Klan groups is something we can talk about another time, but just so you know, he was in the Klan the whole time, but it was three different clans. There is so much more to say about Louis Bean and the Clan in the nineteen seventies, but I got into this whole mess to tell you a funny story, and god damn it, I'm just going to skip to it. Louis Bean is so integral to the history of this time period that I'm not worried about it. We'll pick up these loose ends in a number of future episodes. I just wanted

30:34Speaker 1:to lay a little bit of groundwork for you before we get to the fifteen year old boys who begged their moms not to make them go back to boy scout camp because of the heavy emphasis on learning how to murder people. In nineteen seventy seven, Louis Bean purchased some land he used to grant from the Texas Veterans Land Board to buy fifty acres of swamp land in the area of Double By You in Chambers County. If you don't have a map handy and you don't know where Double Bayou is, the best I can do for you is that the nearest city would be Houston, but Double Bayou is kind of on the other side of the bay. The land was co owned with three other men, Beam's younger brother Philip, a local attorney named Dale Paschel, and Beam's second in command in his clan paramilitary group, Robert Cecente. Cesinte has a number of aliases, but this is the one that's used most consistently. So we'll stick with that. Paschell would later tell reporters that he'd only purchase the land as an investment and he had no involvement in or knowledge of how it was being used.

31:49Speaker 1:Philip Beam lived in Ohio, and he said if that property was being used for anything, it was news to him. Cesente lived on the property and he would he actively involved in the operations there, but he claimed he had no idea it had anything to do with the Klan, and he was just an enthusiastic hobbyist with a passion for survival training. He just liked camping. By the time they're all making these denials to the press, Lewis Beam is the Grand Dragon of the Texas Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. He is the highest ranking klansman in the state of Texas. And they all knew that. Everybody knew that. There's no way they didn't know that. Dorothy Skaife, a klansman's widow by the time the compound was built, lived in a trailer on the compound. She and her husband had been friends with David and Chloe Duke. The local newspaper ran a photo of her holding David Duke's infant daughter at a Klan bookstore grand opening in nineteen seventy six. None of this was a secret. You couldn't not know that these people clansmen, and that Lewis Bean was using the land as a training facility for clansmen.

33:07Speaker 1:They called it Camp Puller, named for General Lewis Chesty Puller, a Marine Corps officer who served in the occupation of Haiti in nineteen nineteen, the operation of Nicaragua in the thirties, World War Two, and the Korean War. Puller had died just a few years before the camp opened, but Marines had been naming stuff after Chesty Puller for years already. The bulldog that serves as the Marine Corps unofficial mascot has been named Chesty since the fifties, when the human Chesty was still alive. I think they're on Chesty the sixteenth.

33:42Speaker 1:Now it's a real dog. They just named them all Chesty. Robert Cecente, one of the land's co owners, the one who said he didn't know anything about the clan stuff. He said he chose that name because he'd served with Puller in Korea, and Camp Puller sounds like the name of a real Marine Corps base. But Kemp Puller wasn't a real military base. It was modeled after military basis. It was intended to serve a similar function, and many of the men running it were veterans. They used what they learned in the military to replicate the experience of boot camp for their clan recruits. Later court proceedings include expert testimony from a former Green Beret who had reviewed hours of footage of Lewis Beem providing classroom and tactical instruction on the compound. In his opinion, the training was consistent with what would be necessary for a viable military organization.

34:43Speaker 1:It was similar to the training that would be occurring on a military base. It wasn't survival training, it wasn't camping. It was very clear to him that the goal was combat. In October of nineteen eighty, three, years after being bought that land, the Anti Defamation League issued a report about clan training compounds, not just this one. There were several of these compounds in Texas. There were some in Louisiana, Alabama, California, Illinois, and North Carolina. The one in North Carolina was run by another guy we've talked about before, Fraser Glenn Miller.

35:27Speaker 1:And the ADL mailed copies of this report out to various attorneys general. They talked to the press. The FBI said there was nothing they could do about it, and the local cops in Chambers County said all they'd ever gotten were a couple of noise complaints, nothing illegal going on. After the report hit the news, reporters in Texas went to go talk to the neighbors and it turned out they'd been having issues. On November sixteenth, nineteen e the Houston Chronicle ran a story with the headline right wing militants operate armed training center in Chambers County. One neighbor said it sounded like there was a small war going on next door. He told reporters he'd once discovered a small troop of armed men and camo hiding in his bushes, and that his elderly mother was terrified when she saw a group of men with rifles hiding in a ditch by the road when she was driving to church. A trainer at the camp, who wouldn't give reporters his real name, rejected that characterization. It's just survivalist training, he said, quote it's trading that any gorilla would need, but it's also what any boy scout lost in the woods would need.

36:48Speaker 1:And it's so funny that he should mention boy scouts because a week later, the Houston Chronicle ran another story about the compound. The story ran on the front page of the Sunday paper announcing Ku Klux klansmen convicted felon teach area boy Scouts how to kill Camp Puller wasn't just a clan paramilitary training compound. It wasn't just adults preparing for the race where it Camp Puller. It was part of the Boy Scouts of America's Explorer program. I think the program has a slightly different meaning within Scouting today, but back then, older boy scouts in the Senior Scout program could choose several different paths, and Explorer Scouts focused on things like camping sounds great wholesome stuff, and the boys did camp. But after those first stories came out about the compound being used as a clan training camp, some concerned mothers came forward about what else was going on there. Obviously, the more important story is the four years the Klans spent training militant racists, but the funnier story is the few months they spent trying to convince high schoolers that they might need to know how to

38:14Speaker 1:hijack a plane. In the aftermath of the revelations about what was really going on at Camp Puller, it came out that a lot of people should have known this wasn't a good idea. A lot of people could have stopped this. When the instructors from the camp applied to host the Explorer Post in the fall of nineteen eighty, they met with a representative from the Houston Area Boy Scout Council, as well as Lieutenant Colonel R. L. Close, the Marine Corps officer who oversaw the local Civil Air Patrol Cadet program, a program for teenagers interested in the Air Force. Of that meeting, Lieutenant Close said he'd questioned them about their proposed curriculum. Quote. I brought up the garrotting and the machete thing, he later told reporters. I said it wasn't necessary to teach that kind of thing.

39:08Speaker 1:I said, I really didn't see any reason to teach them to use a garat or a machete to kill. He recalls that they just shrugged and they'd take his recommendation under advisement. After that meeting, both the Cadet program and the Boy Scouts Explorer program sent boys to Camp Puller. They had this meeting, they had this conversation, they did not get confirmation that this would not happen, and they sent children there. The camp instructors they'd met with should have sent up red flags right away, I mean, even before they opened their mouths about the murder stuff. Joe Bogart, the drill instructor at Camp Puller, had served four years in the Marines as a cook. He was also a loud and proud member of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. Granted that wouldn't have come up on a background check, and the Boy Scouts of America later defended themselves by saying, there's no question on the background form that asks about things like that, So how could they have found out. They could have found out by simply observing Bogart's behavior because he wasn't shy about it, But the background check should have caught. John Bryant, the Scout

40:30Speaker 1:leader for the program, was on federal probation. He had very recently been convicted for illegally selling automatic weapons. He was not legally allowed to handle a firearm of any kind. Let alone hand out M sixteen's loaded with live AMMO to groups of school children. Another potential scout master never actually interacted with the children. John Allen Moser, was arrested for murder for hire shortly before the Explorer camp got started, but he'd been an instructor on the compound prior to his arrest. Moser, a longtime clan member, had previously spent time in federal prison for possession of explosives and firearms that he'd stolen from the Texas National Guard armory. If they had looked into this place at all, they would have found out that a recent resident had just gone to prison for murder for hire. No one wanted to take the blame for this. John Bryant complained that people were overreacting to the reports of firearm training, saying, quote, we're not teaching these boys how to snipe. They only shoot a few rounds, not proficiently by any means of his lessons. On strangulation, Joe Bogart said it was perfectly

41:56Speaker 1:normal when he was in boot camp to strangle his fellow Marines to the point of unconsciousness, but because these were just children, quote, we didn't have the boys choke each other out. We just showed them how to do it. Parents reported hearing from their children that they'd received lectures on guerrilla warfare that were laden with racial slurs. One boy told his mother that he didn't want to go back after hearing that their next lesson would be on plane hijacking. Two separate families pulled their children out after boys confided in a parent that the frequent lectures about killing people were frightening them. One mother pulled her two sons out of the program when they told her that their next outing would be a trip down to the border to watch for people crossing illegally. And by nineteen eighty Louis Beam had rather famously been associated with a Clan Vigilanti group at the border. So this wasn't some idle notion. This is something that this group had done before.

43:00Speaker 1:There's no evidence that they ever actually took these children to the border, but that may be because the camp was canceled by the following week. In the weeks following these initial revelations, spokesmen for various organizations scrambled between was it really that bad to we didn't know? We couldn't have known. There's no way we could have known. Local representatives from the Boy Scouts claim they had the FBI run background checks on the camp's instructors. The FBI explicitly denied that that wasn't something that they even offer. That same spokesman then defended himself, saying, well, it wouldn't actually even be possible to look into the backgrounds of all their volunteers because there were so many, and all three of these Scout masters were already members of the Civil Air Patrol, So why hadn't they already known about the men's backgrounds. Cescente was pretty publicly the second in command of the Texas Emergency Reserve, which was Lewis Beams Clan Special Forces paramilitary outfit. Ccente would repeatedly deny being involved with the clan in any way, but you can see him out in public doing security for clan events, and

44:20Speaker 1:he owned property with the Grand Dragon. And again, they weren't being sneaky about their intentions. Aside from Cesente's feudal reluctance to admit he was literally a klansman. They weren't really lying to anybody about who they were or what they planned to do. They told everybody what was going to happen. They had those meetings with the leaders from the Boy Scouts and the Civil Air Patrol. They filled out an application for a charter with the Boy Scouts of America, and that charter had already been approved at the national level by the time this happened. It was pending with the local council. When the story broke, of course, they rejected the application. I mean, now that everybody's complaining about it, they know better. So Campuller's application for a Boy Scout charter did ultimately get denied after the story broke, But the county prosecutor said none of this was any of his business. There's no crime here. The government declined to intervene. Nobody was going to shut them down. But in the weeks following these revelations about the Boy Scout camp ccente said he was going to close Camp Puller voluntarily.

45:36Speaker 1:He lived on the property and he said all this attention was making it unsafe for his family. He also complained about it being unfair that he was being smeared with the stigma of these clan associations, something which again he knew nothing about. A Few weeks later, after the Houston Chronicle dug up a photograph of Cesente wearing a clan robe and an audio recording of Cesente speaking at a clan rally where he was introduced by a clan member who said that he also was a clan member.

46:08Speaker 1:He did half heartedly admit that he'd attended a clan rallier too. Louis Beam vowed to continue training people of all ages for the coming race war. At a clan rally a few weeks after Campuller closed in December, he said, quote, we've trade eight year olds, but I'd like to start him even younger, maybe at six. He denied promoting racial warfare, but he said that this military training for clan families was a matter of survival for the white race, and a few weeks later neighbors heard the gunfire start up again.

46:49Speaker 1:In early nineteen eighty one, the clan's violent harassment of those Vietnamese fishermen in the bay was starting to heat up. Don't worry about all the loups who sends this week. I just wanted to tell you about race war camp for kids. But I promise I wasn't wasting your time. You'll hear about all these guys again. Eventually, John Bryant, the scout master with the Federal Firearms Charge, was found dead of an apparent overdose just a few months after the boy Scout scandal. His death wasn't related to this scandal, though.

47:24Speaker 1:In the weeks before his death, the FBI and the ATF had busted dozens of Nazis and Klansmen in a massive international plot to overthrow the government of the Caribbean island of Dominica. Bryant had apparently been recruiting aspiring mercenaries for the invasion that never happened, and Louis Dean well. According to the jury that acquitted him, he wasn't doing anything but allegedly maybe, depending on who you believe. He spent most of the eighties working behind the scenes on a massive nationwide seditious conspiracy. Hard to say nothing ever stuck to him. Weird little guys. It's a production of Pool Zone Media and iHeartRadio. It's researched, written and recorded by me, Molly Hunger. Our executive producers are Sophie Lichtreman and Robert Evans. The show is edited by the wildly talented Ory Gagan. The theme music was composed by Brad Dickert.

48:44Speaker 1:You can email me at Weird Little Guys podcast at gmail dot com. I will definitely read it, but I probably won't answer it. It's nothing personal. You can exchange conspiracy theories about the show with other listeners on the Weird Little Guys subreddit. Just don't post anything that's going to make you one of my Weird Little Guys