This is not quite a transcript, but it is more of a summary of the audio. Substack provides transcripts of the audios that are not too bad. Also, you can turn on closed captions while listening to it by using Google’s Chrome browser and turning on Live Captioning (under “Settings” and “Accessibility”). You can also select any part of the transcript and Substack will play that sound clip. I am continually amazed at how these kinds of technologies are progressing. This is decidedly a less formal way of presenting my work, and we will see if people find it helpful.
As I stated, I can only hit the “highlights” of the 2.5 years after the raid. There are quite a few events that I will cover sparingly, if it all. I had friendships and family relationships that crumbled in those years, some of which I thought would survive anything. For one example of many, my mother worked at the local newspaper. On the day of the raid, when I went back to the office and Alison drafted me into accompanying Mr. Deputy during the search, while I stood on front of our building with Cab, a reporter from the local paper arrived. Our office was only a few minutes’ drive from their facility. The reporter approached us, and when she realized that we were the people being raided, and she didn’t like what she was hearing, she fled. Her article the next day was a series of lies, which was the first of a nearly unbroken series of libelous articles about us, largely dictated to the reporters by Mr. Deputy and other corrupt officials.
I called my mother that evening, to warn her about how we would be in the news the next day, and to keep her head down and not try to defend me. I needn’t have worried about her. She attacked me on that call, refused to have anything to do with me for years, and she even made a scrapbook of her newspaper’s libelous articles about us and took it on tour to my friends, family, and investors, telling the story of her son the criminal. And as usual with my family, she never apologized, and I financially supported her in her last years. All of my immediate family members eventually attacked me, largely over my journey, and I saved all of them. For anybody who has walked on the high road in this field, they all have similar stories like that, of betrayals and attacks by friends and family.
In the wake of the raid, we scrambled to avoid the next death blow. Dennis tried to make Ventura redundant, and he organized ten regions of the USA for our effort. One kit buyer was Ken Hodgell. Just as Mr. Deputy had perfected his Boy Scout charade, Ken looked and acted like Mr. Rogers. The speech he made to become one of our national directors was so good that even Alison gave him applause. Ken was Mormon, and was the world’s largest potato grower at one time. When Dennis was arrested, just like Bill the BPA Hit Man did when the time was right, Ken made his move. He mounted an effort to steal the business. His primary henchman was a man named Stu (AKA Mr. Stooge), and I had no idea what was happening, as I hiked in the Cascades. After a month, my future wife asked me to come home, and I retrieved my remaining possessions from my grandmother’s basement in Bellingham, which I put there when I chased Dennis to Boston, and I towed that trailer to Ventura in late July, 1988. I rolled into Ventura in the morning, and before I went home, I decided to swing by the office, to see what was happening, and I had another salient awakening moment.
The offices were deserted, and Stan stood in front of our buildings, talking with Ken and Stu. I learned later that Ken walked through our buildings only a few minutes earlier, announced that he had just come from a meeting with Mr. Deputy, and said that anybody who kept working at our company would be arrested as an accomplice. Everybody fled in a panic, and often stole anything not nailed down on their way out the door. It made what happened in Seattle pale by comparison.
They approached me, shook my hand (although Ken looked a little sheepish), and Stan said that he and Mr. Researcher were going to work with Ken and Stu. In a nanosecond, I could tell that they were stealing the company. I had watched that show too many times already. I tried to not react, but I initially could not believe that Mr. Researcher would work for them. I went to Mr. Researcher’s home that day and tried to dissuade him, but he scoffed at my warnings. He finally woke up when my warnings came true, before he could get into too much trouble. To Stan’s credit, soon before he died in the summer of 1990, he told Mr. Researcher that they were the world’s “saps,” who were easily duped by people like Ken and Stu.
Even though Mr. Researcher watched the deputies ransack his office, he visited Mr. Deputy in a shameful performance (I heard the tape of part of it, before Mr. Deputy began threatening Mr. Researcher – they “lost” that part of the tape), to try to disassociate himself from Dennis, but it was not enough, as he also knew that our technologies were viable. He could have been an expert witness for the defense, so Mr. Deputy threatened him to the extent that Mr. Researcher went into hiding during the preliminary hearing rather than answer the subpoena that Dennis’s attorney was trying to serve him with, and he was in hiding for months.
I had lent the company the use of my American Express card, and in the wake of Dennis’s arrest, Alison desperately tried to keep the doors open to the business and she did not pay off my credit card. Eventually, $27K was charged to my card, which forced me into bankruptcy. That was actually the easy part of my days then.
Mr. Professor soon took in Alison and her daughters, and they lived there for about two years. Victor Fischer had also seen the movie before of stealing the company and did not sign on with Ken Hodgell and crew, as he knew that Dennis made it all happen, but Fischer also did not help and disappeared. Within a month of my arrival, the only people trying to help Dennis in Ventura were Alison, Mr. Professor (and his wife), and me. Mr. Deputy played King Rat, with a string of frightened ex-employees on their knees in his office, begging for his mercy. With his promotion, award, and Dennis in his jail, it was his “finest” hour.
I went back to Washington to hike for a few more weeks, and then it was back into the maelstrom. I had to get a job, and not only was Ventura a tiny hamlet compared to LA, we had been smeared so badly that I could not work in my home town. So I began driving to LA to work as a temp. For somebody who left Southern California twice before, never wanting to return, the irony was rich, as I drove into LA to work. I worked on my bankruptcy filing in those days. That autumn was the preliminary hearing. Mr. Deputy’s position in charge of the jail was purely ceremonial, a reward for taking out our company. His pension is $300K per year today, as part of his reward for taking us out. For the month of the preliminary hearing, he just lounged around in the courtroom, looking like the cat that had just feasted on canaries. In trials, the prosecution’s witnesses go first, and then the defense’s. The prosecution paraded their “victims” on the witness stand, only one of whom acted like a victim, but who had received a refund several months earlier. He had my vote for being a “plant” by the sheriff’s department.
With all of the experts threatened and driven off, I became the star defense witness. One of Dennis’s salesmen was a minister with a degree in physics, and over the protestations of Ms. Prosecutor (and even Dennis’s attorney, who was in on it), he testified to the physics of what we were doing. He earned heaven points for that. A few other dealers from around the USA testified, but my testimony became the key one. My day on the witness stand was the pivotal day of my life, because of Mr. Deputy’s performance, as it was the first time that a psychopath unmasked himself for me. For my entire day on the witness stand, he sat next to Ms. Prosecutor, directly in front of me, and made visible and sometimes audible reactions to my testimony, grinning, chortling, turning his body around and saying things to his sidekick and the reporter from the local paper who sat behind him, as they all had a laugh riot at my testimony. It was some kind of Stalinist show trial. Mr. Deputy’s behavior would not have lasted ten seconds in a grade-school classroom, but in Kangaroo Court, the judge allowed his imbecilic behavior, which was intended to intimidate the defense witnesses. Alison later told me that they did that for all of the defense witnesses. It was incredible. My future wife attended my testimony that day, and Mr. Deputy’s behavior shocked her.
Of course, Mr. Deputy was trying to intimidate me, but he tried it on the wrong man. I testified in late November, and December was my lifetime’s darkest month, as visions of murder danced in my head. That was the lowest part of my journey, that I could even have thoughts like that. Mr. Researched called me, bewailing in sorrow from his hiding place, friends betrayed me, I got a permanent job at a medical lab that month, just as I filed for bankruptcy, and a similar government/media alliance tried to put it out of business right after I started there. I was getting both barrels of how our world really works. Dennis tried to throw a Christmas party for his inmates, and Mr. Deputy threw Dennis in solitary confinement for a month for that “crime,” once again as if Mr. Deputy was some kind of Snidely Whiplash parody of evil. After the farce of a preliminary hearing was over, Dennis began writing his life’s story, in what became the book My Quest. He wrote it up on legal pads and Alison typed it up. They had to smuggle out some of it, as Mr. Deputy’s henchman (the former head of the jail, who really ran it), threatened Dennis and read his manuscript as Dennis wrote it, with the excuse that it was religious proselytizing. They simply made it up as they went along. At one point, Mr. Deputy approached Dennis, with his eyes aglitter, asking how Dennis liked his hospitality. Dennis replied that Mr. Deputy’s reckoning with the Creator would be a grim one, and Mr. Deputy reported that Dennis threatened his life.
Dennis predicted in his book that he would never live on this side of the bars again, but not if I had anything to do with it. As my lifetime’s blackest month ended, I got over my visions of murder and I decided that I would do whatever I could to save Dennis, and that comes next.
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