The Anarchists (2022) s01e04 Episode Script

I'm sitting in Kissimmee, Florida,
flipping through Facebook on my phone
"John's dead."
What do you mean, "John's dead"?
What does that mean?
I'm up, you know,
walking around the house,
going, "What does this mean,
John's dead?"
Could this be a joke?
like, "John's dead, to me,"
you know,
like they'd had a fight,
something happened,
they'd split up.
I called Judy and I'm like,
"Well, can you pull off
the side of the road?"
That's when she told me
what was going on.
I was actually doing Amazon
and Uber at the time,
delivering packages.
I got to my first stop
and I went to the door
and dropped off the package,
and I got back in my car,
and the phone rang.
So she's like,
"You need to go on Facebook."
I'm like, "Why?"
"Lily said that John's dead."
What the hell happened?
Because we really didn't know.
I got a call from Lily.
And mind you, I don't talk to Lily.
So I was like, "Something's wrong."
So I picked up.
"They're shooting, they're shooting."
"Everybody is dead."
"They're shooting, they're shooting."
"John is dead, he's been shot.
There's blood everywhere!"
She's like, "Can you come here?"
And I'm like,
"I can't abandon my children
and go up on a mountain
to find you
until I know
what the hell's going on."
Then I started seeing
Facebook stuff.
Somebody showed up
right after we finished eating
and they shot John,
and John's dead at the gate!
Henza's in the other room dying
and I really need help!
We were attacked.
I've been shot three times.
I'm not doing so good.
Then immediately, my unction was,
"Where is Lily gonna be safe?"
You're watching
something on the screen
I can't do anything,
I can just watch and be confused
and hope for the best.
One message came up,
said, "Did you see what happened?"
And then all of a sudden
it was ding, ding, ding, ding.
And then I got a message
from Lily herself,
"Can you help get rid
of John's body?"
She thought if the police came
they would investigate her
and they'd deport her back
to the US and she'd be in jail
for 25 years.
This wasn't exactly
what I had thought
my day was going
to be like today.
There's one guy who's shot
and in serious condition
I don't know, I haven't heard
any update on him yet.
Do you know how many people
John so far is the only
person confirmed dead.
The day of the attack,
I had a meeting
with Thaddeus Russell.
Thaddeus Russell is here,
he's the author
of A Renegade
History of the United States.
An author, podcaster,
and scholar of America's counterculture.
As his students used to call him,
here's "Bad Thad" Russell.
Thaddeus founded Unregistered Academy.
We teach the things that
the regular universities won't.
An online alternative
for traditional higher education.
Thaddeus was scheduled to speak
at the upcoming
Anarchapulco conference.
But his real interest in attending
was to interview John and Lily.
They were my heroes,
I told you that, right?
I know, it's crazy, Thad.
You were so interested in them. It's wild.
Yeah, so it's tearing me up, Kim.
They represent everything I'm about.
The heart, the soul, the spirit
of what they did.
Escaping this country for those reasons.
And finding a haven and trying to make
the world a freer place.
Yeah, there is no way I'm not going to do
something about that.
Dear passengers, welcome
to Acapulco International Airport,
and for your information,
local time is 8:08.
Kim and I got on
the first flight we could,
and a few days later,
we were back in Acapulco.
We always knew that
Acapulco was a dangerous place.
But the anarchist community
seemed to have created a warm bubble,
floating above the fray
of a cartel-run city.
And with the fourth annual
Anarchapulco conference
there couldn't be a worse time
for that bubble to burst.
People are like,
this might be very bad
for Anarchapulco.
I was kind of naive about it.
I said, "Oh, well,
it's one guy who got shot,
and we're not even sure
what happened."
But there's two keywords involved,
"Anarchist gets killed in Mexico."
He called himself John Galton.
He and his friend were shot,
The news of an American anarchist
being gunned down
in the streets of Acapulco
made international headlines.
You gotta have common sense about it,
but I'd say it's safer than the US.
People were just
attacking us like crazy.
"We knew it, you have
an anarchist conference,
I mean, people are gonna get killed."
"This is what happens
when you get involved with Jeff Berwick."
Essentially making it out
like I'm some cult leader
who lures hippies down
to Mexico to their death,
and laughs about it.
The way they reported it,
it sounds like somebody made
an attack on Anarchapulco.
It wasn't in that place,
it literally had no connection.
I actually was thinking
it might be the end of Anarchapulco.
With the gunmen still at large
and the media searching for her,
Lily was in hiding.
But we were able to arrange
an interview
with her for Thad's podcast.
This is the first interview
she will have given to the media.
- We've arrived, guys.
- Let's go.
Yeah, it definitely wasn't
our favorite building,
but it is fairly safe.
All right, so let's start
from the top then.
All right?
So I'm in Mexico,
in an undisclosed location
with a woman who goes by
the name of Lily Forester,
sometimes Lily Devine.
What I want to ask you first is,
what has it been like, past two weeks?
The longest nightmare I've ever lived in.
Nights are the hardest
I used to wake up
and just reach over every night,
and make sure he was still next to me
the whole time we were together,
and now when I reach over there,
it's just pillows.
I literally lost everything I cared about.
John was the only person
I trusted with everything.
It is definitely the most insane thing
I've ever experienced,
and it's something
I would never wish on anybody.
Nobody deserves to go through that.
The three of you
were in your house, right?
It was you, John, and Jason Henza.
Yeah.
Rebel dog started barking.
Rebel started barking
like there was a threat.
And I saw a couple of
angry-faced young Mexican boys
just pelting rocks at the house.
John went tiptoeing around the truck,
and I heard, "Bang, bang, bang."
I hear more bangs
and I see Henza getting hit,
and then I see Henza just drop
like a bag of potatoes.
And I saw a young Mexican.
that cops carry around,
and he, like, definitely noticed me,
possibly even recognized me.
And then I just took off
running and screaming.
And I heard footsteps behind me,
and I thought that was them
coming after me.
And I, like, I was so scared,
I didn't even slam
the outside door of the house.
And I was sitting there crying
like, "Oh my God,
I'm about to be slaughtered."
I also heard a slam,
and that slam was
Jason running for his life.
And I opened the door, and I let him in.
And I was like, "What about John?"
And he was like, "John is dead."
of anything, but I just screamed
for a solid couple of minutes straight.
Screamed, "My baby," over and over again.
And I just sat there scared for my life
as my friend was probably
bleeding out in front of me,
I thought Jason was gonna die.
And I was like, "I'm about
in this house with a bunch of killers."
"My friends are dead
and I don't know what to do."
If somebody's listening,
Somebody showed up
right after we finished eating
and they shot John and Henza,
and I was in the house,
and John's dead at the gate!
Henza's in the other room dying,
and I really need help.
Somebody please come!
The only person that responded
in any way
other than, "What's going on?"
was our friend, Michael Alexander.
And he ran up the hill, risked his life,
and he ran through
to come and get us out of the house
and down the driveway,
and then I saw John
and I just lost it.
And they're like,
"Come on, let's go,"
and I was like,
"I have to move him,
I can't just leave him."
He was laying
in the most terrible position.
I picked him up and I moved him,
and I'll never forget things
like the fact
or the sound that his head made
as it lightly thud on the ground
as I laid him down,
and I just laid there with him and cried.
And then I fled for my life,
and I've been basically fleeing
ever since.
We were attacked,
I've been shot three times.
I'm not doing so good.
I know,
hopes and prayers and all that stuff.
I wish I could do something.
I'm at John and Lily's
I think it's backlash.
I love you.
I gotta go.
I'm going to try to survive.
I was shot bad.
My wrist, my chest, and my knee.
And it was bleeding really bad,
to the point where it was really dark.
Lily drove me to the hospital.
That staff was scared.
They were telling me it was a cartel hit
and they didn't want any part of it.
They put me in a wheelchair
and they were pushing me
out the door.
I tried to convince them,
I handed them 6,000 pesos,
of bloody pesos out of my pocket
and said, "You gotta take me."
The direction changed,
they put me up onto the table
and started working on me.
And next thing you know,
there's like 200 cops around the building,
military men and federales
and all that shit
just standing around the building.
Now, I'm scared outta my mind.
Like, I really thought
they were gonna come back
to kill me,
because everyone's saying
it's a cartel.
So like, I'm just thinking,
"Okay, I'm dead."
For about five hours,
they couldn't get my chest
to stop bleeding.
The surgeon came in
to advise and they just said
put a compression bandage on him
and hope it stops bleeding.
Once they knew that they had
stitched me up everywhere else,
and I got up and walked out
of the hospital.
Jumped in a taxi,
went straight to Lily.
We went over
to her friend's house.
We just went in a room
and just went to sleep.
The stream of news around
the murder wasn't letting up.
Local police claimed they found
a drug lab in the house
with equipment
for processing narcotics.
In my opinion,
John and Lily were selling cocaine.
And in the face of the cartel,
this is a controlled area,
you don't sell, you don't sell.
There's no competition here.
This is a monopoly,
and you listen, or you die.
But isn't that being told
what to do?
Doesn't something about that
not sit right with you guys?
Of course, it doesn't sit well.
I mean, like, who wants to be told
that they can and can't do things?
My least favorite word in
the English language is "allowed."
Yeah.
But we operate, you know,
within the confines
of the environment we're in.
Everyone says,
the only way
that gringos get killed
by the cartel
is by selling cocaine,
and that's what Lily and John
were doing. Is that true?
- Okay.
Where those claims came from
was a guy named Paul Propert.
That guy was the guy
that was selling the cocaine.
In the hotel where the conference
was being held,
you, John, and this guy Paul
had a room from which
you basically operated an open-drug market
where any drug pretty much
was available for sale.
- So, that was not your room?
You and John were not
selling cocaine in that room
- in Anarchapulco last year?
- Nope.
Okay, and Paul,
you're saying, was.
Yeah, it was
"Paul's Fiesta Supplies,"
is the name of what he had
called his store.
We knew those lines
and we were never interested
in crossing them.
Coke, heroin, and meth,
- Right, the powders.
- You do not want to be
- dealing with those.
- No powders?
No powders.
Paul knew that,
because after the conference,
- Paul had people after him.
- Right.
And it was, you know,
pretty obvious,
and we were just like,
we know we don't want that heat.
Paul had been persistently feuding
with John and Lily.
And with tensions coming
to a head after the murder,
Lily chose to escalate.
Oh, of course, I blame Paul.
He had been threatening
exactly that thing for months.
Right after we kicked him out,
it was literally
like thousands of messages.
The antagonism was not equal
toward you and John.
No, it was always more towards John.
He kept threatening
having people coming
to the house
and killing John specifically,
which is what happened.
I thought he paid some
poor-ass people
to come kill him.
It's a hell of a coincidence
if he didn't cause it.
Yes, I got drunk a lot
and was a drama-queen
keyboard warrior
and talked a lot of shit.
We still needed to hear
Paul's perspective,
so we reached out to see
if he'd be willing
to sit down for an interview.
I almost died hiding John
and Lily's secret cocaine business.
It wasn't until after
I blamed it on him on Facebook
that he started coming after me.
Did you think about calling the police?
No. 'Cause I knew if the police came,
then I was getting deported.
Lily and Henza were hangin' out
at the Anarchastle
and were in the middle of this
flame war with Paul.
We didn't really know what happened,
we just know that John got killed.
People were saying
that Paul did it,
or that Paul got somebody else
to do it.
But we knew that Paul
was potentially dangerous.
Paul had gotten this kid
to drive a car down
and bring a bunch of, like,
melee weapons.
Like bats with nails on them.
And so the kid came
and was staying at our house
and had parked the car
in front of our house.
At which point we were like,
"What the fuck?"
Our concern was,
we have 25 people
living in the house.
Lily and Henza are in the middle
of a war with a guy
that's been accused
of murdering John,
and Paul's buddy is outside
with a bunch of his weapons.
Way too much going on.
We were very carefully asked
to find a different place
to lay low
because it was drawing
too much attention,
and this house
was kind of a center of community
when we first found out.
But we had no money,
we had nowhere to go.
Yeah.
My head was spinning.
Okay, now what?
Now what do we do?
They took it as
we're not sheltering dissidents,
or something like that, right?
Like, we're not sheltering them
in time of need, type of thing.
I guess that's true, I don't know.
All right, this video
is intended for Anarchapulco,
Anarchaforko communities.
I miss you,
my heart aches with you.
There's an emergency among us.
How will we respond?
With shelter, with safe houses,
with passage over borders,
if necessary.
I feel a sisterly affection for Lily.
I told her, I said, "Honey,
You have a safe house here
in Belize."
And there were more than
that maybe I shouldn't do that,
or maybe I shouldn't, you know,
get involved like that.
she's a danger."
Almost like, well, basically, like,
don't stick your neck out
because you might get cut.
Like that kind of thing.
I was like, "What?"
We need each other
to get this done.
I mean, we need each other
just to move one inch forward.
What is community? You know,
if you can't rally around
someone when they're down,
then what is the fricking point?
This is kind of a special edition.
We're gonna touch on some issues
with safety and such for Anarchapulco.
There's been a lot
in the news lately,
basically all over the world.
And Jeff, as far as Anarchapulco goes,
are there any
special measures for safety,
or is there even any need for that?
Hey Danny. Good to talk to you.
Yeah, it's been a tough week in Acapulco.
As a lot of people know,
someone in our community,
you could say,
It does appear that they were doing
something related to drugs
But you ask about, if we increase security
It's really, truly not necessary.
This has not changed anything.
This is about as safe of an area
That part of Acapulco, there is sometimes
Really, it's about as secure of an area
as anywhere in the world
that I've ever been.
As the 2019 conference
was coming in,
and then the murder happened.
And it was like, "Oh, my God,
are we gonna go now?"
Got one message,
"I'm gonna cancel, I'm scared."
And then just message
after message.
"I'm gonna cancel, I'm scared."
Then Judge Napolitano says,
"I'm not coming."
We had sponsors saying
they wanted out.
I didn't think anyone was coming.
And I was just sitting there like,
"What the fuck's going on?"
Do you think
there was any danger?
Fear is a normal, natural part
of life, I think.
But too many people let it guide
most of their actions.
The world is not as good
and he would know exactly
and I'm still at a loss.
I see all the places
we used to go.
I just can see him walking
around there
doing all of that last year.
The Fork is dead.
It's not happening.
Anarchaforko died
with him this year.
Looking out at views like this
makes me want to stay forever,
and it makes me want to leave
right now.
Lily and Henza
came out of hiding
to meet with John's family
at a hotel.
I had talked about coming here
many times over the years,
but unfortunately,
just with my life,
I couldn't make it down here.
We had talked about coming,
my stepmother and I had talked
about coming last summer,
and it just didn't happen.
They came to Acapulco
as soon as they could.
It was the first time
they had seen Lily
in over four years.
It's really hard for me to know
that I didn't get to come here
with him.
He was happy here.
The first time
he called and told me
he was going to Mexico,
I cried the whole night.
I knew it was dangerous there.
I knew that things could happen.
He was trying to carve out
a life for himself,
and trying to find his own path.
I saw their life through Facebook.
It was good for me to see that
because he was living the life
he had always talked about.
He was living the life
It has been good though,
to come here and meet his friends,
and the people
who cared about him.
In a way, it's given me a little peace.
So many good people
that he has met
they talk about him,
and the way he's influenced
their lives.
to know that he was still
the same Shane
that I always knew,
that he didn't change.
- He never compromised himself.
- Yeah.
Kim and I only knew John Galton
by the alias he had taken up
when he went on the run.
John and Lily,
those aren't our real names,
like you understand that, right?
Now, his mother shared
with us his given name,
Shane Cress.
Call me Shane.
His grandfather loved
the movie and he's like,
"I really like that name,
you guys should use that name."
If there's one thing
he taught me it was
how to stand up for myself.
And if there's one thing
that my family really hated
about him,
it was that he taught me
to stand up for myself.
'Cause that'd mean
I stood up to them.
Yeah.
So, that's why I stay strong.
To try to be more like Shane.
Thank you so much for sharing that.
It's not been easy,
but it needs to be shared,
'cause everybody's just thinking of him
as some cartel thug.
And he just wasn't.
We made a mistake
of trusting the wrong people,
but that won't happen again.
I'd rather have no friends
at all than have friends
that are gonna pull shit
like what Paul Propert did.
The whole purpose
of traveling to Acapulco
was we want to get him home.
We'll get him cremated in Mexico,
and we will take his remains
home with us.
We went to the police station.
They said, "Oh, we have somebody
that can help you."
They brought this guy in
to the police station.
And then they told us the price.
They wanted 25,000 dollars, American.
And I said, you know,
I said, "This is too much,
I can't afford that."
They wanted to put him
in a mass grave.
This is my daughter's only child. No.
I spent the next two days
at the hotel
calling all the funeral homes.
And I found a place in Mexico City.
The price he gave me
was very reasonable.
It was, like, right around 6,000 dollars.
The whole thing is just screwed up
from beginning to end.
And then there was the morgue.
When you even got close
to the building,
you could just smell it.
The epidemic
of murders in Acapulco
is putting unbearable strain
on the city's resources.
There simply aren't enough
freezers here,
so bodies rot in bags
on the floor.
I couldn't identify his body.
I thought I could,
but when I got there,
I waited outside and she went in
and did all that.
They had pictures
that they had her look at,
because by the time
we got there,
he was not in any condition
to be viewed.
I asked for one of his dreadlocks
'cause I'm sentimental and I wanted
one of his dreadlocks just to hold onto.
They were like, "Oh, that's not possible,
which is pretty fucking awful.
The thing that he went
to Mexico to get away from
was the part that we had trouble with,
the bureaucracy of it all.
This whole thing,
it was something from a movie.
There were many times
Our house was always
tragic experience, you got to see
a whole different side
of other people.
fight or flight neuroses.
We pretty much, like, closed our door
and we didn't leave our house.
It's been a really tough year.
a lot of stress on our family.
At this point,
we've been booted out
of Anarchapulco
because there is clearly dysfunction
in the people running it.
And so I said,
"Why don't we have a conference
that's built on healing people?"
This is the seating area that gets used
for the most adult conversations.
This is where Anarchawakening,
and name of our conference was created.
You know, what better time than now,
here at the beginning of 2019,
than to give yourself
the gift that keeps giving,
and that's to invest in your healing,
and it's now.
Anarchawakening became the name.
And, because we already had
people in town for Anarchapulco,
Anarchawakening would happen
the same time.
Our community,
our world is crying, often.
to face some of that stuff.
It's time. Jump in,
come to the festival
and, you know,
see where it takes you.
Lily and Henza
were still on their own,
searching for a place to live.
I saw everyone just kind of push us away.
We didn't know what else to do.
We felt like the police
were chasing us,
we felt like maybe we could die
at any moment.
We got a hotel for like 30 dollars.
And there was just, like,
a matter of Henza healing
from his gunshot wounds,
trying to not fucking kill myself.
My life, in large part,
the way it ended up,
if I'm being totally honest,
is because of the choices
I made to resist the government.
The only reason that, you know,
we were in Acapulco
and in Mexico to begin with
was resisting the state.
The state has oppressed me
and I've had to deal with it,
It's nerve-wracking.
I think this
is a good point in the story
for you to just say
who you really were,
or who was hiding inside you
this entire time.
What, like my real name?
which is sad 'cause I like it.
My real name is Miranda Webb.
It's a lot to process,
not living as yourself
for a long time.
My name's Randy Webb.
I'm Miranda's father.
I don't know what to say.
To see her get with Shane
and turn into a fugitive and run
from the country,
is totally unimaginable.
Then again,
that's kind of how she was raised too.
My entire life, since conception
has been affected
by the war on drugs.
My parents met
because my dad was buying weed
off of my mom
for years before they got together.
Red,
she was very highly intelligent,
graduated from high school
with a 4.0 average.
But she was a party girl.
She was an alcoholic,
My mom told my dad
that she was pregnant
when they were getting arrested
for possession of cannabis.
I have a lot of memories here.
I grew up here.
Miranda used to play here
when she was a little girl.
What are some
of your earliest memories?
Camping with my dad.
And shady people around my mom.
Or she's out partying every night.
I couldn't deal with that.
Miranda was two years old
when I left her.
I always had to question,
is she really mine or not?
That's sad to say.
You gotta understand,
Red had five children,
all five of 'em from different fathers.
I'm the oldest. I was born in '87.
Miranda came along in '93.
After her and Randy split up,
that's when things went
kind of back
how they were prior to her
and Randy being together,
we kind of just lived day to day.
It was very common to not have
food on the table.
I would have to go steal groceries
out of people's trunks
when they were taking carloads
into the house.
It was explained to me as,
this is just what you did to survive.
I'm paying a hundred dollars a week
child support and picking
my kid up on a Friday night
and they're all starving to death,
'cause Red's priorities wasn't right.
This is when she was
getting involved with heroin.
I didn't realize it at the time.
One day, all of us kids
are sitting in the living room
watching cartoons,
'cause it's Saturday morning.
And all of a sudden, the door flies open
and the cops came flooding in
and held us all at gunpoint,
and brought my brother out of the bedroom
with a gun to his head
because he got scared and ran.
She was, like,
selling heroin at our house.
I remember a cop explaining
to me that they had my mommy
in jail and that I couldn't see her
because she was in trouble
for doing a bad thing,
and that I had to wait
for somebody to come get me.
Do you think that
shaped her adult perception
- of authority?
- Oh, absolutely.
And I don't blame her one bit.
I remember waking up,
it was about 8:15
and I had left my cell phone downstairs.
And I remember just hearing it buzzing
on the table,
and it was Miranda.
My mom had a psychotic break
after taking some bad drugs,
and she started hallucinating.
She was seeing
some real dark shit,
from my understanding,
being chased by demons,
things like that.
And she ran into Route 18
in Medina, Ohio.
Got to the middle and tried to get
my little brothers to come with her.
And my little brothers
were like, my stepdad's holding
onto them like,
"No, you're not going
She tried to come back,
and she came running back
looked up at, like, my stepdad
and got hit by a semi.
She was, you know,
dead on the spot.
That was it.
Everybody kept comparing me
to my mom after she died,
because I looked so much like her
and I was a lot like her,
emotionally speaking.
She had a struggling,
failing body for most of my life
and she used drugs for it.
I started to have the same
pain issues that she had,
not-so-great decisions in her life,
and I was scared
that I was becoming my mom.
Going to Mexico,
I thought, like, I could just
leave all that behind me.
The drug war here,
or the local trade,
I can't call it the war.
The local trade has been
and a lot of blood.
John knew that better
than anybody.
To cross the line
of the established
drug trade here,
I stood right up here,
about halfway up the driveway,
and Lily was at the top
of the driveway.
I feel really lucky.
I'm sitting here in the spot
And John just fell victim
to a drug war.
Oh, gotta go.
No, no, no,
no, no, no, no. No. No, no.
goodbye to John.
And suddenly these two
unmarked vehicles show up.
They're white trucks,
and there are some grubby-looking
motherfuckers in this.
I'm like, it's time to go.
Someone screams at me
and tells me to turn around.
And I notice he's pointing
a gun right at me
and his finger was not on the barrel,
it was on the trigger.
I had convinced myself
that was cartel coming to kill me
because they were just coming up
to check out what happened up there.
Then someone pops out of the car
and I see a clipboard.
And then I notice it's a woman.
I'm like cartel women, clipboard, no.
I realize they were fucking cops.
They want to know what I'm doing there
and who am I associated with
and this and that.
And then they said,
"Leave or you'll get arrested."
And I'm like, fuck it.
So I get in my car and drive away.
Everywhere I went those days,
looking around,
seeing who was around me at all times.
Like, who's here, who's here,
who's here, who's here?
Like, any group of cops,
even fucking one cop
It would've really sucked
to have witnessed a murder,
then got deported
and then put in jail.
It was very difficult
for Lily to exist around Acapulco
because all the cops
knew who she was.
They knew who John and Lily were.
They knew the hair.
She was just so easy to see.
One day I got chased down by police.
They recognized me
and they started chasing
after me with a vehicle.
I ran in the opposite direction
and they chased after me
that way too and tackled me.
I was surrounded by, like,
five or six vehicles, 40, 50 people.
"Where is Paul?"
And I'm like, "That's not my job."
"That's your job.
Why are you harassing me?"
And they're like, "Well,
he's your brother, right?"
And I'm like, "No, he's not."
"He's just some crazy guy
that fucking moved into my house
because of my now-dead boyfriend."
They asked me like,
who I thought did it.
And I told them,
it doesn't matter to me.
He's dead, I don't care.
And they're like,
"Well, we wanna put the guys in prison."
Like, I don't.
I was just trying to not get deported.
And then eventually,
they fucking let me go.
I always had no idea
where I was going
when I rode up here.
- In the back of the truck.
I couldn't believe how quickly
John would drive us up.
These roads are so confusing.
Yeah, it's like a forgotten
neighborhood up here.
This is the street.
Yeah, the gate's open.
The police investigation
into John's murder
wasn't making much headway.
And rumors continued to spread
through the community.
But amidst the confusion,
one narrative was presented
to me that seemed
the most coherent.
Nathan had a,
I guess you could call it,
an all-encompassing theory
around the murder,
which did actually involve Paul.
If you don't mind, I want to read you
the messages that Nathan sent me.
No, we didn't.
He goes on to say,
"Paul went around the conference
acting as a combination,
marketer-mule."
Then he says,
"Paul's old girlfriend,
who he had threatened
with violence,
wanted to get rid of him,
so she told the cartel guy
she knew that he was dealing
and they sent someone to hurt
or kill him."
This person reached out
to Nathan about it,
and Nathan said, "I'll talk to Paul."
Yeah, Paul told us about that.
He said that Nathan Freeman
saved his life.
He goes on then,
later that year,
Paul has a falling out
with John and Lily,
they become bitter enemies
and Paul was really pissed about this.
He reached out to his contact
in the cartel and says,
"I was just the mule
and the fall guy."
"The person that was really
selling the drugs was John."
"Please leave me alone. I just wanted
people to have a good time."
"They monitored John
for a couple weeks."
"They saw him dealing
with a competitor's product."
They didn't touch Lily.
She's the messenger trying
to convey this idea
of "don't step non their territory."
Leaving you to tell that story.
The only piece here missing
is this idea
that John was getting involved
with the competitor's product.
But there were times where, like,
we would be fighting
and he would just take off
on the motorcycle
and I would be left in the house,
you know?
I have no idea.
I do know that he had friends
that he had connections to with weed
that had some real deep connections
in that city, familial connections.
And I talked to one of them,
he was like,
"I've been asking around,
I'm not hearing anything from my sources
about competition."
"I'm hearing something about
named Paul."
- Okay.
Where those claims came from
was a guy named Paul Propert,
and that guy was the guy
Thad's podcast interview
with Lily had dropped.
and was Paul was lying
to save his own life.
Lily's accusations
of Paul's involvement with the murder
now went beyond just Facebook posts.
of these stories to our friends
and it's another thing
to share 'em with the world.
It set Paul off.
These people are not free,
they are not human.
I cannot and will not let this go.
It's amazing how destructive
human beings can be
if they decide to not cooperate
and play nice.
Like, they can do heavy,
heavy damage
to people's peace of mind.
And that's where the edges
of my anarchism started to crack,
because how do you deal
with that?
As anarchists, what do you do?
You call the cops?
That's weak, you know?
How much of an anarchist can you be
if you're gonna call the cops?
You're using the state,
are you getting the state involved?
A lot of people were asking me
to do something about it,
like I'm the mayor of Acapulco
or something, right? But, like, I'm not.
I wasn't like, "Call the cops,
and take them to court."
Just, like, handle your own
business and see what happens.
And I think that's the way it should be.
This is Free Talk Live.
We are at Anarachapulco 2019
for day one.
The opening ceremony
is just about to kick off
with Jeff Berwick taking the stage.
Straight to the moon
Bitcoin all the way
Dollar vigilante
All up in your hearsay
Dropping crypto knowledge
Making the ladies go cray-cray
There was some legitimate fear
that Paul might do something,
like fucking set off a bomb
or something at the conference.
But I decided to go,
because I figured, like,
this might be the end of it,
and I like to see a crash in real time.
Thank you all for being here.
Five years now.
Had no idea.
You never know where things are gonna go
or what's gonna happen.
There was a death here
about a couple weeks ago.
Many of you are probably aware of it,
his name was John Galton.
Not his real name, obviously.
I was gonna say a moment of silence.
We already had it, there we have it.
we'll see who's really serious
about their principles.
are a testament to that.
I heard so many things.
"Don't go to Acapulco,
it's so dangerous,
someone just got killed." Sucks.
We're gonna change the world,
and as we're doing it,
they are going to come after us
like you've never seen,
this is nothing.
People are going to die.
If we're going to get rid
of governments
and central banks,
they're not gonna go away easy.
There's gonna be propaganda,
there's gonna be triple suicides
to the back of the head,
three gunshots.
That's what they do.
We have to be strong.
Can you guys be strong?
Are we strong?
Thank you all for coming.
Thank you so much.
Thank you.
Thank you. Thank you.
It was only the first day
of the conference,
but already it was clear
that John's murder
had knocked the Anarchapulco community
off balance.
Exposing the difficulties and risks
of putting ideology into practice.
And then, lurking at the edges, was Paul.
He was very much
in an alternate reality.
He was the anti-hero.
When he hits a wall, he fights
and he threatens people.
It's like somebody that's walking around
with a bomb, you know,
it's like, yeah, the bomb's not going off
right now, but there's a bomb there.
Because he was an ex-military guy,
because he had PTSD,
because he was trained,
the possibility that he would do
something crazy
was actually credible.