The Finders: Lost and Found

Table of contents :
TheEyeofHorus 7 ASmokingGun 13 FromFreeStatetoGoatgate 21 Hysteria 27
AmericanTaoists 33
AFinderSpeaks 39
Poor Taste 45
Ted Gunderson Makes an Appearance 51
A Suitable Narrative 57
The Beat Goes On 65
Appendix 1: Interviews 67
Appendix 2: Email 87
Notes 91
Bibliography 93

Citation preview

CONTENTS The Eye of Horus 7 A Smoking Gun 13 From Free State to Goatgate 21 Hysteria 27 American Taoists 33 A Finder Speaks 39 Poor Taste 45 Ted Gunderson Makes an Appearance 51 A Suitable Narrative 57 The Beat Goes On 65 Appendix 1: Interviews 67 Appendix 2: Email 87 Notes 91 Bibliography 93

Evidence of cult activity in East Liberty, Pittsburgh

The Eye of Horus It was an unusual, global-warming-warm Sunday afternoon in early March when I found myself in an alley off of North Highland Avenue in Pittsburgh, looking for a place to park. I was going to meet a friend from out of town at an otherwise vacant hotel bar in the city’s East Liberty neighborhood. As I drove, I came across several buildings that were covered with strange graf+ti that seemed to connect Ivanka Trump to the KKK and pedophilia. For example, on the glass wall of one building, the following was written in black spray paint: IVANKA TRUMP IS KKK PAEDOPHILE

KIDNAPPED 3215 3126 3127

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Above the word “kidnapped” was a hastily-drawn Eye of Horus, which I thought was a nice touch. In my most recent book, Satan Goes to the Mind Control Convention,1 I investigate something called recovered memory therapy (RMT). Without going into too much detail, RMT therapists claim that memory is like a tape recorder. The red light’s always on, but memories of extremely traumatic events will be “repressed” or hidden. (This theory of repression is used by recovered memory therapists to explain how things which appear too strange to be true—including alien abductions and sexual abuse involving roving bands of undercover Satanists—could happen outside the conscious awareness of their patients.) Although it has its origins in bad science and bad medicine, this belief has become pretty commonplace among the public at large. The idea of the “breakthrough,” where someone, just sitting in therapy talking about their childhood, will suddenly experience a :ood of memories of abuse that had been trapped somewhere in the recesses of their mind, waiting for the opportunity to make itself known is a trope you can still +nd in books and movies (as well as a 1997 episode of Mr. Show2). The scienti+c community has known for a long time that memory doesn’t work this way. Memory is a process —your current memories aren’t stored intact somewhere in your mind, they’re something you’ve been rehearsing and revising for the lifetime of the memory. Your 8

memories of the past are seen through the lens of your present, and these memories are famously unreliable. Not only are they clouded by the present, they can also be entirely fabricated in the present. Which is the real function of recovered memory therapy, whether the practitioners realize it or not; to fabricate memories of abuse where none before existed. Which brings me back to that graf+ti. Perhaps it was the work of a delusional individual, someone who really thought that they were kidnapped by Ivanka Trump and her squad of “paedophile” Klansmen. This would (probably!) be an example of delusional thinking. But as I said to my friend that afternoon, this kind of delusional thinking doesn’t happen in isolation. There is a whole subculture of people on the internet who think that Ivanka Trump (or some other malefactor) is out to get them. These people call themselves Targeted Individuals, and like most good conspiracy theorists, they begin with a premise—in this case, that they are under attack by some group or another—and then they work backward, looking for the “proof” of this reality in all the seemingly innocent events in their life. If you’re trying to “prove” that you’re the target of a violent conspiracy, and if you scrutinize the details of your boring life hard enough, you’re liable to +nd plenty of weird little details that could be used to build your case. And this will be enough to convince some people. But if you really want to convince people that you’re the 9

target of a government mind control conspiracy, you’ll need more than that. You’ll need to +nd evidence of a bona+de government mind control cult. That’s what this story is about: the myth—and reality —of one such group.

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The Eye of Horus

A Smoking Gun In the conspiracy community, the most compelling evidence of organized Satanic ritual abuse is the case of the Finders, a Washington, D.C.-area “intentional community” or “cult” (depending on who you ask). The group’s infamy dates back to the early 1987 arrest of two Finders in Tallahassee, Florida, Michael Holwell and Douglas E. Ammerman. According to most accounts, Holwell and Ammerman were traveling south by van in the company of a number of ill-kempt children, four boys and two girls, ages 2-7. If that wasn’t creepy enough, the adult men were wearing business suits. The children, it is said, were in a condition that almost certainly spoke to abuse: unbathed and covered in insect bites. Jasun Horsley is an author, podcaster, proprietor of a thrift store, and quite possibly someone who has been abducted by aliens. In his book Prisoner of Innity: UFOs, Social Engineering, and the Psychology of Fragmentation, he summarized the Finders story, writing that when they were found by authorities, the children didn’t seem to

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know what telephones, television sets, or toilets were. The children were not allowed to live indoors and were only fed as a reward. Their handlers, the two Finders men, wouldn’t talk to the police, except to say that they were traveling to Mexico and that the kids were headed to a “school for brilliant children.” Police in Tallahassee suspected that the men were either producing child pornography or traf+cking the kids, so they contacted the United States Customs Service. Customs, upon learning that the group’s headquarters was in Washington, D.C., contacted the Washington D.C. Metro Police Department. As it so happened, the cops in D.C. were well aware of the Finders and had been looking for an excuse to bust the group. “The Finders were described in a court document as a cult that conducted ‘brainwashing’ and used children ‘in rituals,’” according to Horsley. “Photographs allegedly showed naked children involved in bloodletting ceremonies of animals and sexual orgies, including a photograph of a child in chains. Evidence was found for an international network of child traf+cking for sexual and other purposes.” This is all damning stuff. So why hasn’t anybody, besides a group of fringe conspiracy theorists, heard of the group? Horsley writes that the investigation was scuttled at the behest of the United States government. “It was turned 14

over to the CIA as an ‘internal security matter,’” and the kids were handed back to the Finders. The source for this charge, that the government pulled the plug on the investigation, is a United States Customs Service report compiled following the arrests. The report is available on the internet.3 To my knowledge, the CIA hasn’t commented on any of this, but what it seems to indicate is highly unsettling: if anything involving the Finders is a CIA “internal security matter,” then it follows that whatever it is that the Finders was doing with those kids, it was doing it at the behest of the CIA. In February 1987, when the Finders case +rst broke, this country was in the midst of the Satanic Panic. This was a moral panic that convinced a large number of Americans, for a time, that there was some truth to the charges of the recovered memory movement. Police and parents across the country were put on high alert for signs of devil worship and child abuse. Satanic cult sacri+ce— once restricted to pulp +ction, slasher +lms, and nightmares—was believed to be real by a large number of people.4 The details of the Finders case are so odd that they seem to demand an occult, if not supernatural, explanation. Special Agent Ramon Martinez of the U.S. Customs Service was present when D.C. Metro searched the Finders properties. He claimed that while no children were found on the premises, there were “large quantities” 15

of diapers, toys, and children's clothing. Behind a locked door in the warehouse was found: ...several computers, printers, and numerous documents. Cursory examination of the documents reveal detailed instructions for obtaining children for unspeci+ed purposes. The instructions included the impregnation of female members of the community known as Finders, purchasing children, trading, and kidnapping. There were telex messages using MCI account numbers between a computer terminal believe to be located in the same room, and others located across the country and in foreign locations. One such telex speci+cally ordered the purchase of two children in Hong Kong to be arranged through a contact in the Chinese Embassy there. Another telex expressed interest in “bank secrecy” situations. Other documents identi+ed interests in high-tech transfers to the United Kingdom, numerous properties under the control of the Finders, a keen interest in terrorism, explosives, and the evasion of law enforcement.

This could only point to, as so many familiar with the case have surmised, an international child traf+cking organization. Journalist Nick Bryant has written about how the event became the catalyst for his own investigations into the sex crimes of the political elite. “The USCS report certainly triggered a paradigm shift within me,” Bryant states in The Franklin Scandal. “I suddenly became willing to entertain ideas that I

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previously would have discarded with dismissive skepticism.”5 And we haven’t even arrived at the weirdest part of the story. “I was granted unlimited access to search the premises,” Martinez states in the Customs report: I was able to observe numerous documents which described explicit sexual contact between the members of the community known as +nders. [sic] I also saw a large collection of photographs of unidenti+ed persons. Some of the photographs were nudes, believed to be of members of Finders. There were numerous photos of children, some nude, at least one of which was a photo of a child "on display" and appearing to accent the child's genitals. I was only able to examine a very small amount of the photos at this time. However, one of the of+cers presented me with a photo album for my review. The album contained a series of photos of adults and children dressed in white sheets participating in a "blood ritual." The ritual centered around the execution of at least two goats. The photos portrayed the execution, disembowelment, skinning and dismemberment of the goats at the hands of the children. This included the removal of the testes of a male goat, the discovery of a female goats womb and the "baby goats" inside the "womb," and the presentation of a goat's head to one of the children.

For those who are inclined to believe that the CIA must be

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involved in child abuse and Satan worship, the Finders case is the smoking gun, the material evidence that has eluded them for so long.

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“People just showed up to camp out. Hobos they were called, or beatniks, whatever.”

From Free State to Goatgate The group that came to be called The Finders was founded by Marion David Pettie while he was serving in the military and living in Washington D.C. In the 1930s and 1940s, Pettie was sort of a proto-beatnik, a freespirited fellow who had two apartments “and just kept open house,” as he told Len Bracken and Kenn Thomas in Steamshovel Press.6 “It was supported by the gift economy and I would throw something in. Some people would say I threw in my good taste.” Presumably, he did this partially out of a sense of adventure, and partially as a learning opportunity. What better way to learn about the world than to open your doors and have it come to you? Eventually, Pettie expanded this project by purchasing property in the rural Washington D.C. area. He called this the Free State. “Anybody could show up in those days,” one of the Finders told me (more on him later). “In the sixties and seventies, people showed up just to camp out. Hobos they

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were called, or beatniks, whatever. And he was into all those scenes and studying them.” Eventually, the Free State would morph into the group commonly known as the Finders. “There's no such thing as the Finders,” Pettie pointed out in Steamshovel Press. “It's just a group term for people who like to hang around me. That could be anybody. There's nothing in writing. There's not even a group.” According to a journalist named Wendell L. Minnick, Pettie left the Air Force as a Master Sergeant in 1956, and his wife worked as a secretary in the CIA from 1957 to 1961. And George Pettie, one of Marion Pettie’s sons, was an employee of Air America, the infamous CIAowned airline, in Vietnam.7 It’s hard to say what all of this means, exactly, even if some folks seem to have all the answers: The Free State, according to an anonymous memo making the rounds of the conspiracy community in the 1990s, was an intelligence operation intended to in+ltrate the American counterculture. To this end, in the 1960s and 1970s, Pettie’s network included Norman Mailer, Timothy Leary, and Ken Kesey.8 By the 1980s, the Finders had embraced that era’s communications revolution. According to journalist Daniel Brandt, he +rst encountered the group when two representatives of a company called Information Bank approached him in August 1984 to get a look at his :edgling NameBase database.9 As Wendell Minnick 22

reports, this was only one of a number of Findersaf+liated companies. In addition to Information Bank, there was AAA-1 Information Finders, Bio World, Emergency Services, Global Press, and Graphics News Services, to name just a few. For as long as the Finders was around, and as weird as it was, surprisingly little had been written about it until the 1987 scandal in Tallahassee. And soon the American media had even lost interest in this. The Finders referred to the scandal as “Goatgate,” on account of the pictures of slaughtered goats that caused them so much trouble (the name is echoed by “Pizzagate” 30 years later).10 Depending on what you believe, the police investigation into the Finders was either scuttled by the CIA or +zzled out when various governmental agencies failed to +nd evidence of any crimes. Then, in late 1993, U.S. News and World Report ran a story that brought the Finders back on the public’s radar. “Through a glass, very darkly,” the headline read. The article, which cited the United States Customs report, repeated several allegations from six years earlier.11 “Could our own government have something to do with this Finders organization and turned their backs on these children?” Florida Rep. Tom Lewis asked the magazine. “That's what all the evidence points to, and there's a lot of evidence. I can tell you this: We've got a lot of people scrambling, and that wouldn't be happening if there was nothing here.” 23

“Through a glass, very darkly,” U.S. News and World Report (1993)

Hysteria The Free Lance-Star is a Fredericksburg Virginia newspaper covering the largely rural areas south and southwest of Washington, D.C.—including Culpeper, Etlan, and Nethers, where the Finders owned property. The paper ran several stories about the group after the Tallahassee arrests. An AP story by Ed Birk ("Children May Have Been Part of Devil-Worship Cult") quotes Tallahassee police spokesman Scott Hunt. "As far as we're concerned, this goes from coast to coast and from Canada to Mexico," he said, a statement that probably should’ve given skeptical reporters pause. He continued, saying that the search warrant issued for the Washington, D.C. raids “revealed that the organization is probably headquarters for some type of Satanic cult. Adults are encouraged to join this group and one of the stipulations ... is that they give up the rights (to) their children." According to Birk, Metro Police +rst became aware of the Finders when a con+dential source “said he had been

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recruited by the Finders with promises of '+nancial reward and sexual grati+cation' and had been invited to explore Satanism.”12 More than anything, I’m struck by how casually police of+cers and journalists throw around terms like “Satanic cult” in this reporting, as if Satanic cults are commonplace things that require no further explanation. This can be attributed to the Satanic Panic, which was currently infecting law enforcement and the media with the notion that Satanic cults actually were commonplace things that required no further explanation. Eventually, a Free Lance-Star staff reporter named Mike Allen made the trek to rural Virginia to see the Finders properties up close. According to Allen, neighbors said that children “stayed all summer” in the Finders’ rural outposts, “and dropped in for occasional weekends during other seasons.” Sometimes, perhaps inevitably, a kid or several would get loose. The children's diets were reportedly restricted to fruit, and at one point several Finders children wandered off to ask a neighbor named Wilma Richards for milk and cookies.13 Allen also came across evidence of the Finders' penchant for communications technology, which—many years before ubiquitous broadband internet access— added a “high-tech” dimension to this presumed Satanic cabal:

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A black Channel Master satellite dish sits 25 feet from the rustic cabin and inside, two doors have been laid across crates and cinderblocks to form an apparent computer work station. Beneath is a set of heavy-duty electrical outlets, and nearby are a data-base catalog and the instruction book for an electronic-mail system.

Worden G. Robinson, the owner of a bed-and-breakfast that neighbored one of the Finders properties, said that the group was odd but probably not Satanic. And that the children weren’t abused so much as neglected. “They were always having to squirrel the kids away somewhere,” he told Allen. “It wasn't malicious—it was just irresponsible. They'd ferry them off somewhere and they'd forget to put someone in charge.”14 This rings true, once you put the Customs report in its proper context as a document of Satanic Panic-era hysteria. Perhaps odd for a Satanic cult, but not for a group of holdover Sixties mis+ts, Mike Allen didn’t seem to have any trouble +nding people to voice support for the group. And neither did I, once I started making some phone calls. I’ve managed to speak to quite a few people who knew the Finders, then and now. Tyler Rabbit, a +lmmaker who has been interviewing members for a documentary, was particularly helpful. As was Michael Phillips, a San Francisco businessman and (according to his website) the “+rst person to write about the linguistic structure of money.” The author and NPR contributor 29

Andrei Codrescu, who related his encounter with the group in the book Comrade Past & Mister Present, replied to an email that I sent him and asked me to report back anything that I might learn. It seems that people still +nd the Finders fascinating 30-plus years after Goatgate. It also seems that people who were acquainted with the group personally don’t buy into the conspiracy theories pinpointing the Finders as a Satanic CIA front organization.

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Like a positive version of Lord of the Flies (in the back of a panel van)

American Taoists Michael Phillips, an entrepreneur and long-time Bay Area +xture, +rst became associated with the Finders in the early 1970s. He called the community “a middle-class commune. It was anarchistic in every respect, except they kept very good track of money. They had a good bookkeeping system. It was an astounding operation. I was always fascinated by it.” The group’s founder, Marion Pettie, was greatly in:uenced by Taoism, and Phillips described the group’s philosophy as an “American Taoism,” with a dose of anarchism. “Their view was every day you wake up and decide what to do that day. There should be no planning, no history. And they are just magni+cent at that, absolutely incredible. They’d get together in the morning, by whatever mechanism they used, either as a group in a circle, or by phone, and they’d +gure out what they were going to do that day. Usually before 8 o’clock in the morning. And at the house in Georgetown, you can make breakfast if you wanted, or someone would make

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breakfast for 4 or 5 people. It was very anarchistic. And where you slept, and whether it had bedding on it, was entirely dependent on who invited you.” Phillips described the group as earning a living through a series of “scams.” “Every party in Washington D.C. [was] catered by the Finders,” he said. “They all had tuxedos, they’d put on a tuxedo and serve the food. They had a great reputation, it didn’t take any skill or competence, left them free all day long. Then they’d go cater something from 5:00 p.m. until 9:00 p.m., which they loved, because they could eat! And they’d get all the extra food they had leftover. They had scams like that left and right, all sorts. And they were never short of money, the institution. The Finders as a group had lots of money.” I also asked him about the Finders’ treatment of their kids. Of course, that’s the most common allegation—that the group was mistreating children, and worse. “At the peak, I think there were only 6 kids. Occasionally people, friends of the Finders, would ask them to take care of their kid for a week or a month. So the number might expand to 10, but basically, kids of the members of the Finders were at most six. And almost all the males were named Michael, so I was not happy about that.” I laughed. “I was not happy about that,” he repeated. “The suggestion was, the implication was that I had sex with all 34

the women. Which I never did! I may have had sex with one, but it was long before she had a baby. Anyhow, I did not like the fact that they named all their kids after me.” “That’s funny,” I said. “I know, I know,” he replied. “They thought it was funny, too. Hilarious.” The way that he said this, it sounded like he still didn’t appreciate the joke. (This is possibly just inadvertent myth-making on Phillips’ part. When I asked a former member of the group, he assured me that none of the Finders’ children were named Michael.) “None of the Finders, to my knowledge, will ever give you any information,” Phillips told me. The Finders didn’t want to be scrutinized when it was around, and now that its founder is dead (Marion Pettie passed in 2003) the group doesn’t seem to be any less media shy.

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[REDACTED] detail from FBI memo re: Finders (ca. 1993)

A Finder Speaks Two days after my conversation with Michael Phillips, I got a phone call from an older-sounding gentleman. “So, what is it that you're looking for?” He asked me. “Who am I talking to?” I asked in return. He wouldn’t give me his name, but it wasn’t long before I deduced that I had a real life Finder on the line. The +rst thirty minutes or so were spent in a discussion about philosophies on tribal living, the gift economy, how people are naturally polyamorous, and about how it’d be a good career move for me to write a feature +lm treatment about the Finders. Then, once I felt we had a sort of rapport, I started asking things speci+c to the Finders’ history. To my relief, he continued to answer my questions. First, I asked him about the kids. I wanted to know if the stories of abuse were true. “What’s the +lm that I'm trying to think of,” he asked, “where kids live together on an island?” Lord of the Flies? “It was a positive version Lord of the Flies,” he said. “The kids were in the country living together, no adults 39

around. The adults were kind of on the outside, just kind of observing them through glasses. And we had a lot of property, so we put down some natural barriers—logs and things like that. So they had a large space out in the country with shelters, tents, and different things. And they just lived there in the summer. And they were, you know —food always showed up. They knew that there were adults around. But they just took care of each other. The older took care of the younger. And that was pretty much the central idea of kids being free, and raising each other rather than being in small families.” He said that the kids liked being Finders—and the way he described it, it did sound nice. Then again, lots of kids have suffered over the years for their parents’ experimental lifestyles. And the parents, however wellintentioned, might be the last to admit as much. Then I asked him about Goatgate. According to the Customs report, there was photographic evidence of animal sacri+ce involving children in robes. The story that he told me was odd, but it rang true. At the very least, it seemed much less absurd than the urban legends of CIA mind control and Satanic ritual abuse that most conspiracy theorists pin on the Finders. The group was “staying on the farm in the summer and they got some pet goats,” the Finder said. “And then they were gonna leave for the winter to go down to Florida, so it was time to slaughter the goats. What they call ‘animal husbandry.’ The kids got to watch it, and had 40

to put on white sheets so they wouldn't get splattered on, or somebody did, whoever was doing the cutting or something. So that was made [interpreted by law enforcement] into a Satanic ritual!” That might seem outlandish, but you’d have to have a wild imagination to think it sounds more far-fetched than the idea that the Finders was some sort of CIA mind control cult. “We studied the intelligence community pretty carefully,” he continued. “The Mossad, and you know, all over the world, some of the smartest people. We studied the Jesuits as a model of people working together. And you know, everybody. I don't know if you know the name Bucky Fuller, you know, a thousand other people in high tech, we followed all that very closely. We know a lot of people personally through our histories. We traveled and knew a lot of people in a lot of places. We spent a lot of time in San Francisco where the tech was, and later in L.A. Florida for a while. Boston because the ties back in Boston, a lot of people knew people in different places. Chicago, that was another one. Pittsburgh, that was another one. We de+nitely spent time there.” I remarked that the Finders seemed to be a kind of laboratory, an opportunity to try out different ideas and different ways of living that aren’t necessarily condoned by the normative culture. “Yes, of course,” the voice replied. “Obviously it was that. It was that from the start. Everybody knew that it 41

was a play, a drama. ‘Game’ was the word that was used, which covers what you're talking about. Life as a game, as a creative game.”

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Q: What do you make then of these stories that connect the Finders up to a pedophilia ring in the CIA? A: The pedophiles and all that stuff... Q: That's all smear? A: I just kept open house to a lot of the counter-intelligence and intelligence people over the years. I have been reported to their security officers probably plenty of times for trying to find out what's going on in the world. I've tried all of my life to get behind the scenes in the CIA. I sent my wife in as a spy, to spy on the CIA for me. She was very happy about it, happy to tell me everything she found out. She was in a key place, you know with the records, and she could find out things for me. And my son worked for Air America which was a proprietary of the CIA. There are some connections, but not to me personally. Excerpt from “The Finders' Keeper: An Interview with Marion Pettie” by Kenn Thomas and Len Bracken, Steamshovel Press #16 (1998)

Poor Taste As I spoke to more people, it became clear to me that the Finders were an intriguing group, but not in the way that the conspiracy theorists think. They seemed to be mostly harmless, but their project was largely antinomian—that is, it de+ed conventional morality and social norms. And in this country, simply making your own rules can turn you into a public enemy. All it takes is one suspicious cop or one phone call from a nosy neighbor. The conspiracy theorist’s image of the Finders is so cinematic, so off, that it’s hard not to believe that the group was up to some unimaginable evil. Part of the menace is simply because the men wore suits, like an ad hoc Men in Black. Rather than being sinister, however, this was merely Finders fashion. Groups as diverse as the Amish and the Hasids and the U.S. Army have dictated the sartorial choices of their members for years, and no one seems to have anything bad to say about that. Were they nice suits, at least? I asked Michael Phillips.

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“They were always in poor taste,” he laughed. “They were clean suits that came from St. Vincent de Paul [thrift stores], with a white shirt and a tie. And they did clean the shirts.” They were neatly dressed, in other words, but not particularly well-dressed. “They didn’t look like they were going to work at a bank,” he said. The most damning claims made against the Finders can all be explained away relatively easily. The “Satanic ritual” photos were merely pictures of the kids observing as the livestock was slaughtered, as happens all the time, all over the world. The group wasn’t committing an act of Satanism, it was committing an act of agriculture. As for the photo albums, there used to be a time when you could take a picture of your kids without being accused of manufacturing child porn. But in the hands of zealous law enforcement, even the most innocent pictures can be misconstrued as pornography. An investigation followed and, even though the police clearly had it in for the group, all the charges against the Finders were dropped.15 Chicago psychiatrist Dr. Nahman Greenberg, who was hired by the Florida Department of Health and Rehabilitative Services to assess the Finders children, concluded that the kids did show signs of depression, but “he did not know if the problems were long-term and caused by the children’s upbringing, or temporary and caused by what they had been through just before being

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found.” Ultimately, Greenberg concluded that there was no evidence of sexual or physical abuse.16 While Customs Special Agent Ramon Martinez, the author of that infamous report, was running around the Finders warehouse in Washington, D.C. searching for evidence of Satanic child abuse rituals, the FBI was also looking into the matter. According to Athena Varounis, who was assigned the case, “the Finders were an odd bunch of people, but they weren’t kidnappers, they weren’t pedophiles, at least from the evidence that I saw. There was nothing to support any kind of federal violation.”17

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Theodore L. Gunderson (1928 - 2011)

Ted Gunderson Makes an Appearance It’s not entirely certain who leaked the Customs report to the press. At +rst, I suspected that it was Special Agent Martinez himself. A June 2001 Time pro+le of the prominent right-wing militia activist Mark “Mark from Michigan” Koernke contains quotes from Martinez, who had been a friend of Koernke’s when they both attended Eastern Michigan University.18 Martinez “con+rms that Koernke made casual racist remarks and was enthusiastic in extolling the economy and technology of Hitler's Third Reich,” according to the story in Time. “But the two stayed friends. Martinez was Koernke's best man when he married.” And later, Martinez became the godfather to Koernke's daughter. Koernke was a big name on the far-right speaker’s circuit in the 1990s, as was a former FBI agent named Ted Gunderson.

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Gunderson, who died of cancer in 2011, was a former head of the FBI +eld of+ces in Los Angeles, Dallas, and Memphis until he went into business for himself as a private investigator in the 1980s.19 Gunderson never met a conspiracy theory he wouldn’t pro+t from, and indeed, a pamphlet titled U.S. Customs Service Report on the Finders is one of the documents Gunderson is known to have distributed. Just having this little bit of information, it’s not hard to +gure out how the Finders became a bête noire of the conspiracy world. Law enforcement in Tallahassee contacted the Customs Service when it came across the Finders, and a conspiracy theorist named Ramon J. Martinez happened to take the call. Martinez, a right-winger who is primed to see Satanists in every case that crosses his desk, authored a report that embodied all of his fears about childabusing, devil-worshipping hippie pornographers. The report was quickly repudiated and stuffed in the back of a +le cabinet somewhere, until Martinez leaked the report to Ted Gunderson (through his friend Mark Koernke), who added it to his growing collection of conspiracy merchandise. This all sounds pretty good to me, and it makes sense if you know anything about the players in this story. But I can’t prove it at the present time. This is all conjecture. Conspiracy theory, if you will. And my conspiracy theory is supported by just as much evidence as the more 52

popular (and more outlandish) theories that put the Finders and the CIA at the center of a worldwide Satanic child smuggling operation.

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High-tech evil (ca. 1987)

A Suitable Narrative I must admit, I was pretty pleased with myself when I +nished writing that last section. I +gured I had come up with a suitable narrative to explain a situation which was, quite frankly, perplexing to anybody who had given it any serious thought; and that’s where things would have remained if it weren’t for a call I received on a spring morning in early 2019. Caller ID was no help—the number was marked private. So, despite the fact that I receive something like 1,000 spam calls a day (rough guesstimate), I answered. It was Ramon J. Martinez, who had seen my number on his caller ID. After I explained who I was and what I was after, he told me that he doesn’t do interviews —“there’s nothing in it for me,” was the exact quote. He then proceeded to keep me on the phone for the better part of an hour, answering all my questions. But +rst, he asked for my credentials. It seems that the last so-called journalist who contacted him about the Finders was some sort of “left-wing subversive nut,” a “YouTube reporter,

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or whatever,” who even went so far as to drive from Texas to the metro Washington D.C. area to harass him. Martinez told me that he had no idea who Ted Gunderson was, and that he hadn’t spoken to Mark Koernke (a “wackjob”) since the early eighties. Indeed, he claimed that he had once even reported Koernke to the ATF when he suspected that his friend was stockpiling illegal weapons. Thus, in the +rst +ve minutes of our conversation, Martinez torpedoed my “Martinez-as-rightwing-extremist” conspiracy theory. I asked him if he’d ever seen another group like the Finders in his years in law enforcement. He assured me that no, the Finders case was unique. Then I asked him if he’d come across any ritual abuse cases on the job. “Constantly,” he said. They’re “very routine, very, very common,” and “there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it” as a Customs agent. This is because these cases fall under the jurisdiction of the FBI, and the FBI just isn’t interested. Probably the most fantastic part of the Finders story is the allegation that the CIA was somehow involved with the group. According to Martinez, he heard this from a Sgt. John Stitcher of the Washington D.C. Metro Police Department (MPD). Martinez documented Stitcher’s remarks in a report dated April 13, 1987:

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The individual [Stitcher] further advised me of circumstances which indicated that the investigation into the activity of the FINDERS had become a CIA internal matter. The MPD report has been classi+ed secret and was not available for review. I was advised that the FBI had withdrawn from the investigation several weeks prior and that the FBI Foreign Counter Intelligence Division had directed MPD not to advise the FBI Washington Field Of+ce of anything that had transpired. No further information will be available. No further action will be taken.20

Stitcher has been dead since at least 1993, so we can’t really get his side of the story.21 Martinez claimed that the Finders was a CIA training operation that had spun out of control. The agency “let the organization run wild,” he said. “The children were collateral damage, so to speak” In fact, according to a later FBI memo, Stitcher told the FBI that he was never “instructed by anyone,” including the FBI, State Department, “or any other organization to end the FINDERS investigation, and that his investigation ran its normal course without interference.” In other words, the FBI memo (and Sgt. Stitcher) directly contradict Martinez’s claims. Apparently, the CIA never scuttled the investigation. No one did. It ran its course and was wrapped up and that should’ve been the end of it.

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The day after we +rst spoke, Martinez called me again. He had been thinking about our conversation and had another case that I might be interested in reporting. In late 2018, two middle school students were accused by Bartow, Florida police of a ritual murder plot. It seems that they had brought a number of knives and a pizza cutter (!) to school, and were intending to kill someone in the restroom, then drink her blood and eat her :esh, all as a sacri+ce to Satan.22 Children just do not concoct such horri+c schemes, Martinez told me, so this has to be learned behavior. This has to be evidence of Satanic ritual abuse. It was precisely the kind of thing that he heard happens all the time when he was in Customs. As we talked, Martinez said that as a part of the Customs Service Child Pornography Unit, a great deal of his time was spent at conferences and in training, exchanging information with colleagues from other agencies. And in these sessions, the question of Satanic ritual abuse was never far from anyone's mind. Over the phone, Martinez sounded sincere. He also sounded like someone who has had the last thirty years to smooth out the details of his story. After speaking to him, I no longer think he's a frustrated militia member or particularly dishonest. Rather, he sounds like any number of law enforcement of+cials who were a product of the Satanic Panic of the eighties and nineties. I do believe that he is spreading urban legends when he attributes the 60

Finders to a covert CIA program, or when he shares second-hand tales of Satanic ritual abuse, but I am inclined to believe that he also, at least to a large extent, believes these urban legends. Ultimately, the Finders case isn’t evidence of a Satanic abuse conspiracy; it merely demonstrates that not even law enforcement is immune to urban legends and moral panics. Before ending the call, Ramon J. Martinez gave me some advice. “Once you get involved in this stuff, it will suck you in, okay? You’ll start to wonder what’s real and what isn’t. That’s number one. And number two, if you tread on anybody’s toes, you’ll wind up blindsided. You’ll be put on somebody’s hit list.”

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Page from the original Customs Service report (1987)

The Beat Goes On The two Finder adults arrested in Tallahassee, Michael Holwell and Douglas E. Ammerman, spent a total of 42 days in jail before being released on March 18, 1987. In the meantime, the children of the Goatgate scandal in Tallahassee were reunited with their mothers, most of whom then promptly left the community. Several of these families moved to Boulder, Colorado; one woman stayed in Florida with her children; and another moved to Berkeley, California.23 In late 1993, according to U.S. News and World Report,24 the Department of Justice opened an investigation into the Finders at the behest of congressmen Charlie Rose of North Carolina and Tom Lewis of Florida. This seems to have been prompted by the now-infamous Customs Service report. According to FBI documents released in response to a FOIA request, the investigation wound down in early 1995 without finding anything of consequence.25 The Finders received a setback in June 1994,26 when nine ex-members sued the group for a share of its $2

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million in cash and assets. By 1996, according to the Washington City Paper,27 there were only about eight active members left. Ultimately, the Finders was Marion Pettie’s project, and it fell apart not long after Pettie died in October 2003. If the Finders saga demonstrates one thing, it is how easily the historical record can be obscured. A whole mythology has developed around the group, a mythology that is alive and well on conspiracy websites and podcasts. The group never wanted any real publicity in the first place and as a result, the few facts that are widely known don’t add up to much. Ultimately, unless the Finders themselves tell their stories, nothing will remain of Marion Pettie’s legacy but strange rumors and urban legends. Which might have been the plan all along.

Pittsburgh, PA Summer 2019

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APPENDIX 1: INTERVIEWS MICHAEL PHILLIPS Michael Phillips, a long-time Bay Area xture, rst met the Finders in 1973 or 1974, “somewhere in there.” He says that the group never referred to itself as the Finders. “They had no name. They kept changing the name for 3 or 4 years.” We spoke on the phone on April 23, 2018. The following transcript is edited for clarity (and because the call kept cutting out). How did you become acquainted with the group? They were in D.C., and they had a farm in Virginia, which is mostly where the leader, Pettie lived most of the time. I was a social activist in San Francisco, and I was the business manager of the Glide Foundation, and a central +gure in the hippie movement—very, very well known in all areas. They came out to San Francisco, I think three or four of them, thinking about setting up a new center for themselves in San Francisco. They rented out a warehouse, big space. I don’t know maybe 1,000-1,500 67

square feet of empty space, and then they did a sociological analysis of the whole area. And they put it on the wall! So there was no question about how good their research was, it was good. And I was at the very top, as the center of many different networks. They +nally got a house in San Francisco. I think they stayed almost an entire year, but then they moved on. They basically consolidated back in Washington. Ultimately they had as many as seven people in San Francisco. And a decade later, about six of them settled in the East Bay, in Richmond and Berkeley. But they were no longer part of the Finders, and I didn’t stay in touch with them. What was the Finders’ philosophy? They were largely anarchistic in their philosophy. Their view was that every day you wake up and decide what to do that day. There should be no planning, no history. And they are just magni+cent at that, absolutely incredible. They’d get together in the morning, by whatever mechanism they used, either as a group in a circle, or by phone, and they’d +gure out what they were going to do that day. Usually before eight o’clock in the morning. And at the house in Georgetown, you can make breakfast if you wanted, or someone would make breakfast for four or +ve people. It was very anarchistic.

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And where you slept, and whether it had bedding on it, was entirely dependent on who invited you. Among themselves, they could get anything done. And they were absolutely incredible at generating income. One day when I was there and I had a day to myself, they included me in their working project at the patent of+ce. They had a lawyer who picked up all the patent requests that came in, and handed them out to the +ve or six people [Finders] that were going to the patent of+ce. And usually, you would go to the patent of+ce and search through the patents, and then you go one by one to each of the of+ces that are associated with a category of patents, and you might spend an entire day checking on one or two patents at the most. And the patent search was worth $150-$200. And there were +ve of us. And we each had three or four patents. But instead of searching the patents, because there are about 2,000 patent attorneys in the building, we just looked at what the patent category was, went and found that patent attorney, and asked them to tell us about it, which they could do in half an hour. So in half an hour, we could get the answers to every patent—all the citations, all the references. And since they didn’t know any of us, and the +ve people only came in once every few weeks, never ran into the same patent attorney—each of us could earn for the Finders $1,000-$1,500 a day. And be done by noon. It was the greatest system. So here, we were earning $7,000-8,000 a

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day for the Finders for no effort, and be done by noon. It was stunning. They had a lot of scams like that. Every party in Washington DC for the years they were there were catered by the Finders. They all had tuxedos, they’d put on a tuxedo and serve the food. They had a great reputation, it didn’t take any skill or competence, left them free all day long. Then they’d go cater something from +ve until nine. Which they loved because they could eat! And they’d get all the extra food they had leftover. They had scams like that left and right, all sorts. And they were never short of money, the institution—the Finders as a group had lots of money. Barbara was very capable. Whenever we talked about them, I said, this is a middle-class commune. You’ve all been editors of magazines or architects. Very important professional jobs. And here you are in part of a collective or a commune. It was anarchistic in every respect, except they kept very good track of money. They had a good bookkeeping system. It was an astounding operation. I was always fascinated by it. Who was Barbara? Barbara [Sylvester] died before Pettie did. But she was, in fact, the leader. She was the effective leader, Pettie was the theological, ideological leader. Which was a perfect

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relationship — he could speak ex-cathedra, but she would make sure everything happened. And it worked. In Washington, they had one large house in Georgetown and a warehouse. I visited the warehouse, and I even stayed overnight a few times at the house in Georgetown. They’d let anybody stay there! How were the kids raised or treated among the Finders? There was always one or two women who were in charge of the kids. At the peak, I think there were only six kids. Occasionally people, friends of the Finders, would ask them to take care of their kid for a week or a month. So the number might expand to 10, but basically, kids of the members of the Finders were at most six. And almost all the males were named Michael, so I was not happy about that. The suggestion was, the implication was that I had sex with all the women. Which I never did! I may have had sex with one, but it was long before she had a baby. Anyhow [laughs], I did not like the fact that they named all their kids after me. That’s funny. I know, I know. They thought it was funny too. Hilarious. 71

In general, they had a very laissez-faire attitude towards raising the kids. The clothing came from used clothing stores, the toys all came from used toy stores. They were very environmental and very environmentally oriented. And when they +nally got picked up in Florida, that was one of the issues. The kids all looked like ragamuf+ns! There were six of them at the time. They were just dirty and messy—ragamuf+ns is the only way you could describe it. And then they had all these guys, because that was the time when they decided the men should take care of the kids. Take them on a vacation to Florida. And so here we had four or +ve men dressed in suits, and six ragamuf+ns playing in the park. And that really looked weird in Florida. The police saw that as really weird. And then they had a rule that was a Pettie rule, you never talked to the police. Period, ever. But they had lawyers in the group so they could ask one of the lawyers later to do something about it, but at the time, when the police approach you, you don’t talk to them. So here are four or +ve guys dressed in suits, that they wore all the time, and six ragamuf+ns, so the police asked them if they were connected, and who they were. And they wouldn’t talk. You could see that they were gonna be arrested, and the kids were gonna be put in a child care facility, which they were. I was in San Francisco, and I watched the news and what happened, and in San Francisco alone there were 72

something like 200 phone calls to the police, by people claiming that the kids were theirs. It was a public phenomenon that I have never seen in my life. And I was stunned. More than 200 people said these ragamuf+ns, whom they didn’t see, and didn’t know, were their kids. So that was rather bizarre. The Tallahassee police contacted the Washington D.C. police, who in turn said they only know them through the CIA and the FBI and nobody knows who they are or what they’re doing, and we have no authorization to say anything good about ‘em. So some of the guys just decided that it was time to stay in jail. And some of them stayed for a month or so, while learning what jail was like. It didn’t bother them, they were +ne. That was the incident. The rest of the time they traveled around the world. The kids stayed in DC most of the time, and then they went out to their Virginia house on weekends, or sometimes for a few weeks in the summer. But it was always the women who took care of them.” What about rumors that the Finders were some kind of sex cult? Now, sex in the organization was totally run by women. If they wanted sex with any one of the men, they just picked him. And the men were quite comfortable with that. One or two of the men probably got more sex 73

than the others, but the women were pretty fair, as far as I could tell. And whenever the group came out to San Francisco, it was divided evenly — so that there’d be enough men and women, a reasonable match, and so the women would get enough sex. It was totally run by women. Where did these rules come from? All of that came from Pettie. And I don’t know what his experience was, but he [had been] the equivalent of a Masters Sargent in the Army, and so that would’ve been his experience. He would’ve learned from his own experience what he thought worked and what didn’t work. And they listened to him completely. Barbara and the other women ran the operation, but they didn’t make policy decisions like that. Could a group like the Finders exist today? Absolutely not, you know. I can’t +nd three people who can get along well enough to live together, unless it’s a commercial structure. If they’re all paying rent to somebody who owned the place, and hired someone to clean the kitchen and do the work. Yeah, that’ll work. But voluntarily? No. You can’t even get three people. Three gay guys living together. They’ll +ght over who cleans the dishes, who makes sure the food is done and the bills are 74

paid. Three people can’t even agree anymore. The whole communal notion is long gone. Gone by the early 1980s. Tallahassee in 1987 was very different from San Francisco in 1977. Even here in San Francisco, the greatest thing about the police was how ineffective they were, and how little they cared about it. They just didn’t care. You had to be very provocative to get the police upset about anything. They were not afraid of hippies. You had to be very provocative to get the police to do anything, and I think maybe that’s where Pettie got the idea don’t do anything provocative, don’t even talk to them. That’s my guess. Because the police were not provocative, and they didn’t bother anybody. The Florida event was really provoked by how weird they [the Finders] looked. They looked weird! Four or +ve guys, four guys at least in suits, and six +lthy ragamuf+n kids running around without any control. Were these nice suits, at least? They were always in poor taste [laughs]. They were clean suits that came from St. Vincent de Paul, with a white shirt and a tie. And they did clean the shirts. They didn’t look like they were going to work at a bank.

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ANONYMOUS FINDER

The following is the transcript of a telephone call I received as I was hopping into the back of a Lyft on the afternoon of April 16, 2018. For the previous week, I had been reaching out to people whose names had come up in my investigation of the Finders, and this was the rst response I received. He didn’t give me his name so I won’t disclose it here, even though it was subsequently conrmed. I’ve edited this transcript for clarity, to remove redundant passages, and to keep the subject anonymous. Why do you think that groups such as the Finders are suppressed? It seems to me that this is a way of life that a lot of people don't understand. And I don’t know if that's like a modern thing or an American thing, or if people are just not trusting of groups in general? Are you familiar with—what's the word they use now, poly?

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Like, polyamorous? Yes. If you have a society that's based on couple relationships, and you want to practice something different from that, you know—people can be gay, but they’re in a couple usually. So if you're interested in raising kids together—which is one of the most magical things I think you could do on the planet, living tribally. Where the kids are raised together and everybody goes up or down together. That's the key principle. And that goes against the current order. So obviously, you know, you can be almost anything nowadays, and share it with people and they’re not gonna be upset. But if you're poly, you don’t usually do that. That’s frightening to people! I get a sense of the Finders as a laboratory almost, or a playground. An opportunity to try out different ideas and different ways of living that aren’t necessarily condoned by the normative culture. Yes, of course. Obviously, it was that from the start. Everybody knew that it was a play, a drama. A “game”

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was the word that was used which covers what you're talking about. Life as a game, as a creative game. Besides the trivium (pooling together money, power, and sex) was the quadrivium (food, clothing, shelter, and transport). In other words, you have the basics, and you have left-brain and right-brain, if you want to call it that. Anyways, I don't know if there's anything else you're interested in. If it's something you just want to write about that’s one thing, if it’s something you want to experience, that's another thing. But people working together is the future, for sure. There’s not gonna be any jobs in the future. People won’t be driving cabs or doing Lyft and trucks and stuff like that, you know. There'll be a lot of AI and robotics and singularity and nanotechnology and a lot of disease. Because people don't understand nutrition. People are looking for an alternative. So you could think of it, instead of the Arab Spring, you could think of it as the Pittsburgh Spring.” I like that! [Laughs] Wherever you are, people are going to rise up and they’re going to understand how the world is changing so fast. And the key thing that the Finders is about, I think,

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is having a vision of the future. Visualize what it could be, and then just do it. How many members were there at any given time? It varied over the years. Twenty-+ve to thirty, something like that. I think there were six to seven kids at a maximum. And people came in and out. And there were a lot of visitors from all over the world. Everybody that would see it in the intentional community directory. It [life with the Finders] was just all kinds of things. It was hospitality and the gift economy and buildings—an eight-unit apartment building in a nice neighborhood in D.C., right near Georgetown. The Chinese Embassy would send over all their students who were graduate students at Georgetown University, which was just down the street, and you know, the Chinese didn’t have a lot of money, the graduate students. So the embassy would send their scholars to the [Finders] house on W Street, this apartment building, and the Chinese would stay there. And it was listed in one of these guidebooks, [so] when the British came over for the summer to travel, it was in their book and they all came to stay.

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Going back to the conspiracy theory stuff, why do you think the Finders were picked on? Is it only natural a group will get picked on? Or was it an accident of wrong place, wrong time? Well, you gave three different choices, and the answer is all three. You know it was all of those things. It was of the times, it was because some cop in Metropolitan Police had just gone through cult training, looking for cults. And down in Florida in Tallahassee with the kids, some nosy woman called the police. You know, just a whole bunch of interesting things. You know, the Finders have been followed for years by the local people because they wore suits and they had a warehouse over in the warehouse district as a playhouse, and you know, yeah. And the cops always want to know, you know. They thought it was pornographic +lms or something like that, men and women go into a warehouse building together. All kinds of crazy stuff. The playhouse, what does that refer to? The warehouse was referred to as the playhouse. It was a 10,000 square foot warehouse, is that right? I can’t remember all the details. But anyways, it was an old

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produce market. I’m trying to think, there’s one in Pittsburgh. I can't remember exactly where it was. Actually, the one in D.C. has been turned into a hip tech hub. Was there a speciJc Finders child-rearing philosophy? What’s the +lm that I'm trying to think of, where kids live together on an island? Lord of the Flies? It was a positive version of Lord of the Flies. The kids were in the country living together, no adults around. The adults were kind of on the outside, just kind of observing them through glasses. And we had a lot of property, so we put down some natural barriers—logs and things like that. So they had a large space out in the country with shelters, tents, and different things. And they just lived there in the summer. And food always showed up. They knew that there were adults around. But they just took care of each other. The older took care of the younger. And that was pretty much the central idea of

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kids being free, and raising each other, rather than being in small families. Did the kids like it? Oh, they loved it! That’s all they knew. They loved it. You might’ve gone to summer camp, you know, and it's that kind of thing. But as a lifestyle—no one around to tell you what to do. You know, it's freer than summer camp, but I mean it's like that, being with a bunch of kids of different ages. Tribal living. It's a pretty basic idea, you know, the older raising the younger. They get their own social relations and power structures and learn how to get along. And you got a reputation, that's a big part of living together. Every day, every second, you're building your reputation. What about the scandal in Florida, “Goatgate?” The kids were staying on the farm in the summer, and they got them some pet goats. When they were gonna leave for the winter to go down to Florida, it was time to slaughter the goats. What they call ‘animal husbandry.’ And of course, the kids got to watch it and had to put on white sheets so they wouldn't get splattered on, or 83

somebody did, whoever was doing the cutting or something. So that was made into a Satanic ritual [laughs]. And that came later, when the thing happened down in Tallahassee with the kids. So then, the D.C. police raided the warehouse and found those scrapbooks of photos. And a bunch of other stuff. I don’t know if they noticed all the books on intelligence. We studied the intelligence community pretty carefully—the Mossad, and you know, all over the world, some of the smartest people. We studied the Jesuits as a model of people working together. I don't know if you know the name Bucky Fuller, you know, a thousand other people in high tech, we followed all that very closely. We know a lot of people personally through our histories. We traveled and knew a lot of people in a lot of places. We spent a lot of time in San Francisco where the tech was, and later in L.A. Florida for a while. Boston because the ties back in Boston, a lot of people knew people in different places. Chicago, that was another one. Pittsburgh, that was another one. We de+nitely spent time there. Did the Finders have any connection with the CIA?

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Tobe [Robert Terrell] was a CPA and he had retired. He had worked for the IRS before he joined the group. And he did freelance consulting—we all did freelance consulting of different kinds, depending on our skills, and he would do accounting. He did it for a +rm that trained CIA people in how to use computers. That was the CIA connection. And also [founder Marion] Pettie’s wife had worked for the CIA—that was an interesting historical connection. Pettie had studied intelligence. He went to intelligence school. So there are interesting stories there. When did Marion Pettie become interested in intentional communities? I think it started when he was pretty young. When he was still in the military, after being over in Panama. He was back in D.C. and he had an apartment downtown and another one in another neighborhood, and he would offer hospitality on the gift economy to traveling intelligence people that he knew, and others. Just all kinds of weird people. And so he was offering a ‘guest game,’ and then he was married and had two boys, and they were always working together as a team, and they had property, and he opened the property up to anyone who wanted to stay there, something that was called the Free State. Anybody could show up in those days, in the sixties

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and seventies, people showed up just to camp out. Hobos they were called, or beatniks, whatever. And he was into all those scenes and studying them, and he was also into the alternative lifestyle stuff of the back-to-the-land people. They had all these ideas of alternative health and nutrition, back to the land, you know, outdoors, growing food. He made this stuff available to people. He studied them. They were part of the eventual hippies. And so people just showed up and heard of it through word of mouth. He'd gone over into all the old coffee houses, and he was just part of it. As well as the Pentagon. He was at the Pentagon every day, that’s where he worked. And he took his money that he got and invested it in property, and it became valuable land. He was very, very shrewd with his investments. What happened to the group? It was time to disperse and spread the word. You got your training, and now you go out and try to see what you can do, learn by doing. So people dispersed, you know. Northern California, Southern California, places I mentioned, Florida, some in the midwest. I don’t know, there are a lot of different places by now.

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APPENDIX 2: EMAIL From: Andrei Codrescu Tuesday, April 10, 2018 10:06 AM Hi Joe: The Finders - I’m not sure that when I wrote about them this is what they actually called themselves. But they were real enough. A group of overalls-wearing women showed up in Baltimore at our place in the late 70s or early 80s offering to +x the roof, do any chore we needed, from cooking to babysitting, in exchange for room and board for as long as they were needed. We didn’t need them and I didn’t feel like having a house full, so I sent them on their way. At the time I was looking for a mimeograph machine for my magazine, kingdom kum press. I saw an ad in the City Paper for one and wrote back. The person called me and said that she would sell it if we met in person in Washington, DC. I went and met a middle-aged woman living in an old factory building with about +fty (?) people who called themselves (I think) The Finders. I might be wrong about this, they might have

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called themselves The Seekers. She was a charismatic person who gave me a tour of the living quarters and explained the philosophy of her community, which was matriarchal, with men and women’s quarters divided on the loft’s 2 stories. The men lived in bunkers on the +rst :oor and the women in personalized and nicer cubicles on the upper. The men were “weak,” and the women “strong.” Sex was the women’s call, but it was strictly sex, along the Oneida lines. If a woman wanted a man she made a booty call downstairs and the guy showed up to spend the night in a cubicle. I asked her if the same guys didn’t get called more than others. She said, “Yes. The others need to make themselves more interesting.” As for what they did, they were “skill-gatherers.” A number of times a year they met in a common room, a conference room with couches and spinned a globe: the leader (I can’t remember her name — Mary…) pointed at some place without looking, then sent a woman’s brigade to wherever her +nger landed, likewise for a group of men. Very different places. They were then instructed to go there without any money and return having learned a new skill. They also had to bring back $500 (5000?) earned in whatever skill they learned by doing. Their biggest triumph to date was having catered the Carter White House inaugural dinner. They also had a branch in Florida that was later mired in a scandal over child custody with a woman who had left the community. The best way to start your research would be that White 88

House dinner. I am just recalling this — I don’t remember where I wrote about it (possibly in the City Lights book “In America’s Shoes). Let me know where you read this, I’ll re-read it, and we can possibly talk. I’m incredibly busy now, but let me know. Looking back, I’m also interested in that long-ago encounter.

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NOTES 1. Available now! at lennyKatley.net 2. “Oh, You Men” (Mr. Show episode 303) 3. https://bit.ly/2LWNJ0I 4. In 1988, mainstream America reached “peak Satan” with the broadcast of Geraldo Rivera’s TV documentary: Devil Worship: Exposing Satan’s Underground. Eventually, Geraldo had a change of heart. “I am convinced that I was terribly wrong,” he said on his show Rivera Live in 1995. “Many innocent people were convicted and went to prison” because of the Satanic Panic, “and I am equally positive [that the] 'Repressed Memory Therapy Movement' is also a bunch of crap.” Mary de Young, The Day Care Ritual Abuse Moral Panic pg. 193 5. Nick Bryant, The Franklin Scandal p. 12 (2012) 6. “The Finders' Keeper: An Interview with Marion Pettie” by Kenn Thomas and Len Bracken, Steamshovel Press No. 16, 1998 7. “The Finders: The CIA and the Cult of Marion David Pettie” by Wendell L. Minnick, Unclassied, No. 35, Winter, 1995, Pages 19-21 8. “Steamshovel Debris: The Finders,” Steamshovel Press, No. 16, 1998 9. “Marion Pettie and his Washington DC ‘Finders’: Kooks or Spooks?” by Daniel Brandt, NameBase NewsLine, No. 5, AprilJune 1994 10. Tobe Terrell, The Gamecaller (2009)

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11. Gordon Witkin and Peter Cary with Ancel Martinez, “Through a glass, very darkly,” U.S. News and World Report, December 27, 1993-January 3, 1994 12. Ed Birk, “Children May Have Been Part of Devil-Worship Cult,” Associated Press, February 7, 1987 13. Mike Allen, “Neighbors say kids tried to escape,” The Free Lance-Star (Federicksburg) February 9, 1987 14. Mike Allen, “Clues to Finders cult activities turn up at remote Madison farms,” The Free Lance-Star (Federicksburg) February 9, 1987 15. Philip Shenon, “Police say unidenti+ed children in Florida are not victims of cult,” The New York Times, February 10, 1987 16. Ed Birk, “Children Depressed, But Generally In Good Health: Psychiatrist,” Associated Press, February 11, 1987 17. Athena Varounis interview clip with Tyler Rabbit in the author’s possession 18. David Van Biema, “He Was A Boy Who Liked To Jump Out Of The Woods And Scare,” Time, Sunday, June 24, 2001 19. Associated Press, “Former Memphis FBI chief Gunderson dies,” The San Diego Union-Tribune, August 19, 2011 20. https://bit.ly/2YEZTfT 21. https://archive.org/details/TheFinders/page/n18 22. “2 middle school girls waited in a bathroom and planned to cut up their classmates, police say,” CNN, October 24, 2018 23. The Gamecaller, Tobe Terrell, 2009 24. Gordon Witkin and Peter Cary with Ancel Martinez, “Through a glass, very darkly,” U.S. News and World Report, December 27, 1993-January 3, 1994 25. https://bit.ly/2QdmRYv 26. https://bit.ly/2w8tNNs 27. Eddie Dean, “Finders’ Keeper,” (Washington) City Paper, May 24, 1996

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BIBLIOGRAPHY Bryant, Nick. The Franklin Scandal: A Story of Powerbrokers, Child Abuse and Betrayal. Waterville, OR: Trine Day, 2009 de Young, Mary. The Day Care Ritual Abuse Moral Panic. Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Company, 2004 Flatley, Joseph L. Satan Goes to the Mind Control Convention. Pittsburgh, PA: Joseph L. Flatley Press, 2018 Horsley, Jasun. Prisoner of Innity: UFOs, Social Engineering, and the Psychology of Fragmentation. London, UK: Aeon Books, 2018 Terrell, Tobe. The Gamecaller. Self-published, 2009

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