July 31, 2024 • 45 mins
The FBI hunts the burglars, who suddenly have a window into J. Edgar Hoover's most twisted and sinister operations.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Last time on Snapoo.
Speaker 2 (00:03):
We had picked the time to begin the actual action,
timing it to begin with the Ali Fraser fight.
Speaker 3 (00:11):
So I went to the door, mister confident, and there's
a second lock on the door that wasn't there like
two weeks before.
Speaker 4 (00:18):
We got this far, and we're just not going to
give up. And that's when I remembered the second door.
Speaker 5 (00:26):
Who anonymous.
Speaker 4 (00:36):
I was really jacked up. Can you believe it? We
pulled it off without a single hitch?
Speaker 6 (00:49):
Now, were you the first to a rhyme the morning?
Speaker 1 (00:52):
Yes?
Speaker 7 (00:53):
Yes, about seven seven thirty in the morning.
Speaker 1 (00:56):
Frank McLaughlin was an FBI agent based in Media, Pennsylvania,
in nineteen seventy one. On March ninth of that year,
he was the first one to arrive for work, where
his investigative acumen immediately told him is something wasn't right.
Speaker 7 (01:14):
I could tell the lock had been tampered with. I
could tell by looking at it. So then I automatically
looked at the second door, and that was that.
Speaker 8 (01:22):
You are.
Speaker 7 (01:25):
What do you think I suspected that there was a Berkeley?
I mean, yeah, I've been in this business a lot
of years.
Speaker 1 (01:33):
Inside, he astutely noted a few more telltale clues. For example,
all of the documents in the entire office were missing.
Speaker 7 (01:43):
The doors were open and the files were gone. And
I walked into my office a destroyers were rifled. It's
a place that was ramsacked.
Speaker 1 (01:53):
From there, a series of bewildered g men passed the
message up the chain of command. Before Whover even arrived
at his office that morning, his underlings had already enlisted
one of his most trusted agents, Deputy Associate Director Mark Felt.
If that name sounds familiar, it's because a few years later,
Felt would leak evidence about Watergate to the Washington Post.
(02:15):
For that he's better known to the world as Deep Throat.
Speaker 6 (02:19):
That was after a famous porn movie at the.
Speaker 1 (02:22):
Time, Thanks Betty. Anyway, in nineteen seventy one, Felt was
a highly respected g man, the kind the other g
men turned to when the unthinkable happened.
Speaker 6 (02:37):
Mark Felt was in New York and he was shaving
in his hotel room when he got a call telling
him that there was an emergency in the FBI.
Speaker 1 (02:48):
Felt canceled his meetings in New York. He caught the
next train down to Philadelphia. He hustled from Philly's thirtieth
Street station to the FBI office at one Veteran Square
in Media. He strode into the office, took charge, and
immediately got to work covering his own ass.
Speaker 6 (03:04):
So when Mark Felt arrived that morning, he immediately focused
on the safe in the office.
Speaker 1 (03:12):
That safe was the only unburgled thing in the whole office.
It contained the agent's firearms, but no files.
Speaker 6 (03:20):
He thought that this was ridiculous, this is where the
papers should have been kept.
Speaker 1 (03:24):
Yeah, funny thing about that the lead agent and media
had put in a request for a larger safe just
the year before. He specifically noted that not having one
left his office vulnerable to burglars. That request landed on
the desk of Deputy Associate Director Mark Felt.
Speaker 6 (03:41):
The other thing that he asked Felt for was an
alarm system, an alarm system that would be connected to
the police. Felt had turned him down on both of
these things. When he asked why they couldn't have an
alarm system, he said that they were so close to
the local police station that that just wasn't necessary.
Speaker 1 (04:05):
You're close to a police station. If you get burgled,
just scream, they'll hear you.
Speaker 6 (04:10):
And instead of a very large safe, he provided them
with a very small safe.
Speaker 1 (04:18):
We'll never know. I Felt realized in that moment that
this whole snapfoo was kind of his fault. But before
he got to work searching for the culprits, he found
something more important, someone to take the fall the lead
agent in Media, who was sadly reassigned to Atlanta.
Speaker 6 (04:37):
Hoover, urged by Mark Felt, had gotten rid of the
person in the office who knew the most about the
area and probably could have been most helpful in conducting
the investigation. Instead of Deep Throat, they were considering a
nickname that morning. It would be deep Scapegoader.
Speaker 1 (04:59):
Suffice to to say, this was not the FBI's finest hour.
A reporter later described Hoover as quote apoplectic when he
heard about the burglary. Within hours, the director had assigned
over two hundred agents to a new operation to track
down and arrest the culprits. The secret code name for
this operation medburgh medburg.
Speaker 6 (05:21):
I mean it was just a combination of media, meed,
and burglary.
Speaker 1 (05:26):
What a cute portmanteau. For the first time in its history,
classified Bureau documents had fallen into outside hands, but for now,
at least those documents remained secret. Hoover's FBI was in
a race against the clock, and the orders were clear,
find these anonymous burglars before an embarrassment became a catastrophe.
(05:54):
I'm Ed Helms and this is Snafu, a show about
history's greatest screw ups. This is Season two Medburg the
story of a daring heist and the colossal FBI snaffoo
it exposed. Today, the FBI hunts the burglars Todd.
Speaker 5 (06:22):
Haof Hao.
Speaker 1 (06:30):
In the dead of night, hours before Frank McLaughlin would
even discover the crime scene. The burglars sat in a
Quaker farmhouse in the Pennsylvania Woods with pages and pages
of loot. As the adrenaline wore off, it was time
to see what they had scored. They separated the documents
into piles and dug in.
Speaker 9 (06:49):
I think we all trusted each other to know what
was important and what wasn't. Judy and I worked together.
They had a little shed off of the main cabin.
But I remember Judy and I spending a lot of
time in that shed and holding hands and but working too.
Speaker 10 (07:09):
I thought it was very romantic to go through the
files and decide, you know, which ones you weren't gonna copy.
Speaker 11 (07:19):
Yeah, some files were boring and some were strange, like
the memo that informed overweight agents they'd be subject to
weekly weigh ins until they lost the extra pounds, or
the one that instructed agents on the proper protocol for
observing j Edgar Hoover's birthday. Who would have guessed this
guy was more of a birthday diva than my five
year old niece. An hour passed, and the burglars were
(07:44):
undoubtedly feeling nervous that they had just risked everything to
steal a bunch of nothing.
Speaker 1 (07:52):
And then.
Speaker 4 (07:53):
I remember someone in the other room said, you've got
to come and see this.
Speaker 1 (08:00):
The whole team stopped what they were doing and gathered
around one document. Hearts pounding, they took turns reading. It
was a memo from headquarters to all FBI agents. The
memo instructed agents to conduct interviews with anti war activists,
not for the purpose of investigating any illegal activity, but
rather in.
Speaker 4 (08:20):
Order to enhance the paranoia. They were to give the
impression that there was an FBI agent behind every mailbox.
Speaker 10 (08:29):
And it was like, at last something, That's what they wanted.
They wanted people to think that there was a boogeyman
behind every mailbox.
Speaker 6 (08:38):
We had some idea that this was pretty explosive.
Speaker 1 (08:43):
They kept reading, and soon the floodgates opened.
Speaker 3 (08:49):
It was just a constant stream of people saying, oh, man,
look at this, and then everybody would stop and look
up and they would read something, you know, and then
a couple of minutes later somebody would say, holy Macro,
you're not going to believe this.
Speaker 1 (09:02):
One file detailed the movements and grades of a congressman's daughter.
Speaker 12 (09:07):
The records indicated that during the spring semester of nineteen
sixty nine, she attended the AutoMac.
Speaker 1 (09:12):
Who was being surveilled because she, like her parents, opposed
the Vietnam War.
Speaker 12 (09:17):
Where major is fringe and as many courses.
Speaker 1 (09:19):
Another conversation was picked up by a phone tap on
the Black Panther Party's Philadelphia office. The tap didn't appear
to have picked up anything illegal, but agents had taken
scrupulous notes. As one panther phoned his mom to ask
for bus fare, he.
Speaker 12 (09:33):
Asked his mother to send him seventeen dollars to get home.
Speaker 1 (09:36):
They'd also intercepted a letter from a Boy Scout troop
leader asking the Soviet embassy about the possibility of taking
his troop to Russia for a camping trip next summer.
Speaker 12 (09:45):
We would like very much to go to the Soviet
Union to travel through your country and meet our counterparts
in the USSR, if possible.
Speaker 1 (09:51):
Another file alleged quote communist infiltration of a local women's.
Speaker 12 (09:56):
Group, Martin Luther King Junior, who will address the fiftieth
anniversary banquet?
Speaker 1 (09:59):
Be the nature of that infiltration. Martin Luther King Junior
had been invited to speak at their upcoming banquet.
Speaker 12 (10:06):
Copies of the names and biographical data are attached here too.
Speaker 1 (10:10):
A local civil rights leader, Mohammad Kanyata, was also being surveiled.
Speaker 12 (10:14):
There are two persons authorized to sign checks on this account,
and they are Mohammed Kanyata and Mary Kenyata.
Speaker 1 (10:20):
Again, there was zero evidence of criminal activity in his file,
but the FBI had obtained records of his phone calls
and bank transactions.
Speaker 12 (10:29):
The Peltan's account was forty four dollars and thirty two cents.
Speaker 1 (10:33):
As they kept reading, the burglars realized banks, employers, landlords,
utility companies, local police, and individual busybodies had all happily
collaborated with the FBI to surveil their friends and associates,
no subpoenas, no warrants, and absolutely zero consideration for privacy.
Speaker 12 (10:53):
Will continue to monitor bank account of National Black Economic
Development Conference in Southeast National Bank, followed by copies of
bank statements.
Speaker 1 (11:00):
Kiseled chicks and While the targets ranged from women's lib
groups to boy Scout troops, the FBI was clearly preoccupied
with black activists. They weren't just tapping the phones of
the Black Panthers and leaders like Kenyata. Every single black
student at Swafmore College was under surveillance. When they finally
(11:28):
got through all the files, the burglars tallied up what
they'd found. Forty percent of the cases in the Media
office dealt with surveillance of legal political activity. By contrast,
investigations of murders, rapes, and interstate crimes constituted just twenty
percent of the files, and a measly one percent dealt
with organized crime. If the Media office was any indication,
(11:52):
spying on law abiding citizens was the FBI's number one priority,
The stolen files mostly FBI surveillance activity in the Philadelphia area.
Speaker 6 (12:03):
Oh, it was all horrifying. It was horrifying, but.
Speaker 1 (12:07):
It was clear that the mandates were being sent to
FBI offices nationwide.
Speaker 9 (12:11):
I think we all felt disgusted.
Speaker 1 (12:13):
One memo came directly from Hoover, directing all offices to
surveil black student unions on every single college campus in
the country.
Speaker 9 (12:21):
I had no particular admiration for the FBI at that point,
but that was a new low not even I had imagined.
Speaker 1 (12:29):
And Hoover said their activity posed a quote definite threat
to the nation's stability and security. They didn't realize it yet,
but the single most important document the burglars had stolen
was a simple routing slip at the top in big
block letters was a code word, which at the time
(12:50):
meant nothing to the burglars. Co intel pro A single
code word on a single page in a mountain of files,
a needle in a haystack, A needle so dangerous that
Hoover was prepared to do anything to catch these burglars
before that code word could see the light of day.
Speaker 8 (13:25):
I must have been about what six point thirty in
the morning, and I stopped to a paypall on at
Chestnut Hill at a gas station. The whole place was empty.
Speaker 1 (13:35):
I before they could finally return home to their children.
John and Bonnie Rains had one more task. They pulled
up to a gas station and Bonnie waited in the
car as John made a phone call. In his hand
was a statement announcing what the Citizens Commissioned to Investigate
the FBI had just done.
Speaker 8 (13:53):
We'd written a common statement and this was to be
read to the writer's fellow.
Speaker 5 (13:58):
Well, I was dead the phone.
Speaker 1 (14:02):
That's Bill Winzel, the reuters fella, Yeah, the phone.
Speaker 5 (14:05):
And the voice said, this is a Citizens Commission to
investigate the FBI. I thought, oh, this is going to
be interesting. Good Bill.
Speaker 1 (14:17):
On the night of March eighth, nineteen seventy one, the
Citizens Commissioned to Investigate the FBI removed files from the
media Pennsylvania Office of the FBI. These files will now
be studied to determine the nature and extent of surveillance.
Speaker 4 (14:31):
John was on the phone with the reporter reading the statement,
and I was waiting in the car and a police
car pulls up into the gas station. He was curious,
I guess about what we were doing at that time
of the night on a public phone.
Speaker 1 (14:45):
The police car crept by. The officer peered at John.
John spotted the car, but he kept reading. His hand
trembled holding a piece of paper that contained his confession
to a federal.
Speaker 4 (14:58):
Crime, and we just absolutely freaked out.
Speaker 1 (15:03):
The police car kept moving and slowly drove away. John
continued reading, we have taken this action because we believe
that democracy can survive only in an order of justice,
of an open society and public trust. And then the
police car returned, driving even more slowly this time.
Speaker 4 (15:25):
I was really afraid at that point, because John had
that piece of paper right there in front of him
in the phone booth.
Speaker 1 (15:32):
She leaned over and banged on the window to get
John's attention, her expression clearly conveying a message every spouse understands,
hurry the up. But even with the cops checking him
out and Bonnie glaring at him, John dictated the entire letter.
He had a cover story just in case if the
police bothered him, he'd just pretend he was on the
(15:53):
phone with his bookie. He catched the fight last night.
Officer John continued reading the statement. In doing this, we
know full well the legal jeopardy in which we place ourselves.
We feel most keenly our responsibilities to those who daily
depend on us, and whom we put in jeopardy by
our own jeopardy. But under the present circumstances, this seems
(16:13):
to us our best way of loving and serving them,
and in fact, all the people of this land, the
citizens commissioned to investigate the FBI. As John finished and
hung up the phone, the police car drove off and disappeared.
This time it did not come back. Mission accomplished, John
(16:35):
and Bonnie drove home.
Speaker 4 (16:37):
We tore the statement up and threw it out the
window and went home to our kids.
Speaker 1 (16:45):
As the scraps of paper fluttered to the ground, John
and Bonnie laughed with glee or perhaps sleep deprivation. Meanwhile, Bill,
the Reuter's fellow, was wide awake. He just had a
bombshell dropped right into his hands.
Speaker 5 (17:00):
I knew I was going to have to call the
FBI to tell them I had gotten the call, and
I needed confirmation that all your files had been stole.
Speaker 1 (17:14):
Bill expected the FBI to give him the run around,
or a simple no comment.
Speaker 5 (17:19):
You know, they could have said what not answering questions,
but they didn't. They confirmed it, and trustfully, at this
point they're looking pretty bad.
Speaker 1 (17:32):
He laughs now. But Bill would soon realize this phone
call made him a suspect. In the coming weeks, he'd
be stalked by FBI agents. According to him, one actually
punched him in the stomach. Bill could only corroborate basic
details with the FBI. His story ran in The New
York Times the next day, around fifty words in total,
(17:55):
buried on page seven. The story acknowledged that a burglary
had taken place, but said nothing about the nature of
the records that were stolen. Hoover still had time to
catch the burglars before they spilled his secrets. After the
(18:17):
burglars sorted through the files, it was time to share
them with the world. They packaged up copies of the documents,
addressed them to two congressmen and three reporters, and dropped
them in the mailbox. The return label read Liberty Publications Media, Pennsylvania.
At that point, Bonnie says, it was out of their hands.
Speaker 4 (18:38):
We had to depend on courageous journalists and editors to
do their job. Then that was just one more thing
to be anxious about. Would they So we just had
to hope, and we had to wait and see what
the reaction of the general public would be to the
truth about the FBI.
Speaker 1 (18:57):
The burglars would later learn that the congressmen and who'd
received the files had immediately turned them right back over
to the FBI, but not Betty Metzker. She retrieved her
mail at the Washington Post, found a mysterious envelope, and
met the moment head on.
Speaker 13 (19:15):
FBI records stolen from the media Pennsylvania office showed that
one goal of a bureau was to spread that very
impression among left wing organizations that there was an agent
behind every mail box.
Speaker 1 (19:28):
The FBI was falling out of public favor for pretty
much the first time ever, not only for its questionable ethics,
but also for its questionable effectiveness. A New York Times
editorial read quote, little confidence is inspired by the security
measures of a security agency whose files can be so
easily burglarized. Here's burglar. Ralph Daniel I was also real excited,
(19:52):
because we did have some concern that this funky little
outpost for the fbi't wasn't going to have much.
Speaker 6 (19:59):
But we knew, we knew this was dynamite stuff.
Speaker 4 (20:03):
After we mailed the documents, our job was done.
Speaker 1 (20:07):
This was moving along unbelievably well. When the Citizens commissioned
to investigate the FBI met at the farmhouse for the
last time. They renewed the vow they had made at
the start they would never tell a living soul what
(20:29):
they had done.
Speaker 5 (20:31):
We decided we're not getting together as a group ever again.
We really parted ways.
Speaker 1 (20:38):
Apart from John and Bonnie, who continued to be married,
the rest of the crew knew their best chance of
staying safe was to stay apart. No more dinners, no
more phone calls, no returning to media every March for
a reunion barbecue.
Speaker 4 (20:52):
We absolutely could not be in contact with each other
at all. I'm sure that bothered me to some extent,
but that's the way it had to be. It's just
the way it had to be.
Speaker 1 (21:06):
And so the burglars left the Quaker Farmhouse in the
Woods one last time. The Citizens Commission to Investigate the
FBI was effectively dissolved, but the FBI's hunt for them,
code named Medburg, was just getting started, and soon the
g men would come a knocking. When the Washington Post
(21:35):
published the contents of those first media files, j Edgar
Hoover was livid. His only consolation was that the story
could have been way worse. The story revealed the FBI
wanted to make activists paranoid to think there was a
quote FBI agent behind every mailbox. But the article made
no mention of Hoover's biggest liability, the code word co
(21:57):
intel pro. For all he knew, it was just a
matter of time. Hoover needed to catch those burglars fast.
The document containing the infamous agent behind every mailbox line
was basically an instruction manual for how to interrogate anti
war activists. It also included the following quote, some will
(22:18):
be overcome by the overwhelming personalities of the contacting agent
and volunteer to tell all. So there you have it.
All the g men had to do was contact some activists,
overwhelm them with personality, and the suspects would spill their guts.
Let's see how that went. I'm going to read you
some of the actual reports agents sent to headquarters. Two
(22:44):
director from Indianapolis checked on the whereabouts of a man
from Bloomington who agents thought might quote do such a thing.
Two director from Newark possible suspect found by the Red Bank,
New Jersey office a long haired person sitting in a car.
Two director from Philadelphia visited local commune Farkal Farm. The
(23:06):
commune is primarily engaged in drug and sex activities. However,
they could definitely still know something. Okay, buddy, better stay
put there at Farkel Farm, see if you can get
some good inter court I mean. Intel agents had recovered
a partial palm print from the media office, found on
(23:29):
the side of the large filing cabinet. They sent it
to the lab and waited for results. Their strongest lead
was the Unknown walk In, a college girl who had
visited the office weeks before the burglary, ostensibly for a
newspaper article. They had to call her the unknown walk In,
of course, because none of the agents thought to ask
(23:49):
for her name. That really pissed Hoover off. He made
it objective number one for the agents to find that woman.
Speaker 4 (23:58):
Find me that.
Speaker 1 (24:02):
The agents who saw Bonnie in the office that day
worked with a Philadelphia sketch artist to drop a picture
to distribute to agents nationwide. The quality of the sketch
was well, just imagine someone handed you a picture of
an oval and said, go find this egg.
Speaker 4 (24:18):
I laughed. I just laughed and laughed. It was pretty funny.
It's almost like a cartoon.
Speaker 1 (24:25):
Accompanying the sketch was a written description apparently Bonnie's coat
was quote soiled and in need of cleaning and pressing,
and her hair was quote apparently not well combed or
well kept. Were you offended by their description?
Speaker 4 (24:40):
Yeah, I was a little offended. We just knew that
Hoover was beside himself that this had happened.
Speaker 3 (24:51):
Well, I mean, that was no surprise. I mean, two
seconds after Bill suggested the idea, I'm like, they really
gonna be pissed if we pull this off.
Speaker 4 (25:03):
He dispatched two hundred agents to flood the Philadelphia area
to find us.
Speaker 1 (25:12):
Powelton Village is a neighborhood in West Philadelphia filled with
red brick townhouses. In nineteen seventy one, it was a
hotbed of anti war activism. Hoover was certain that if
the burglars were to be found, they'd be found here,
and he was actually right. More than half of the
burglars did live in Powelton Village at the time. Judy
(25:32):
was one of them.
Speaker 10 (25:34):
We knew that we were poking the hornet's nest.
Speaker 6 (25:37):
I mean we knew it.
Speaker 10 (25:39):
We had a lot of heat, you know, everybody was
being intimidated.
Speaker 1 (25:44):
Mostly the g men just sat in their cars for
weeks on end, equipped with long lens cameras watching, and
whether or not somebody was actively involved in anti war
protests didn't really seem to matter to these agents. At
least one resident learned that the heart Way, I.
Speaker 4 (26:01):
Haven't been active in resistance politics or anything, and yet
you know, twelve armed agents broke into my house.
Speaker 6 (26:08):
Throughout that time, very seldom did they figure out actual
information that could lead to arrest. They really lost their
ability to be sharp at solving crimes, and they did
outrageous things instead. And this kind of just massive surveillance.
(26:29):
By sitting in the cars, it's very unlikely you're going
to get information that tells you anything about who broke
into that FBI office.
Speaker 1 (26:41):
This approach was classic Hoover. It was more or less
the same tactic that had been revealed in the media files.
Surveil everyone all the time in what's known as blanket surveillance.
It was exhaustive, time consuming, and generated so much information
that it became impossible to suss out which bits actually mattered.
Blanket surveillance is great for intimidation, but for crime solving
(27:06):
not so much.
Speaker 8 (27:08):
So.
Speaker 3 (27:08):
There were so many agents hanging around village that somebody
in the community decided the way to fight back was
to make fun of them.
Speaker 1 (27:19):
For example, when agents inevitably fell asleep in their cars, a.
Speaker 6 (27:23):
Local resident would stand beside an FBI car and blow
a bullhorn as another residence stood on the other side
of the FBI car with a tray of freshly baked
cookies and milk ready for the agents as they jolded
awake after the bullhorns sound. I don't know if any
(27:47):
agents ever accepted the cookies into milk.
Speaker 1 (27:50):
Somebody also had the brilliant idea to go around and
slap bumper stickers on all the surveillance cars that said
this is an FBI car. And then there was the
street fair.
Speaker 6 (28:05):
They called it Your FBI in Action Street Fair.
Speaker 1 (28:09):
The fair was a spectacle planned by the residents of
Powellton Village to make a mockery of Hoover's FBI. Copies
of the stolen media files, which by now had gotten around,
were nailed to trees. You could get your picture taken
with a life sized cardboard cutout of j Edgar Hoover.
There were skits too, yes open up FBI wa kids
(28:32):
assembled jigsaw puzzles depicting FBI agents sleeping in their cars.
What can I say? It was a family affair. There
were even musical performances captured by a film crew from
the Educational Broadcasting Corporation.
Speaker 7 (28:45):
They know it you are, They know if you are streets,
they know if you.
Speaker 13 (28:53):
Are land all right, And if you plan to smash
the state.
Speaker 8 (29:00):
Better are not crown.
Speaker 10 (29:01):
You better not smiled, You better.
Speaker 1 (29:03):
Not see love me while Edgar Hoover's hanging. Oh no, no, no,
you know. I never really thought about the similarities between
Hoover and Santa before, but I guess they were both
surveillance experts, both pretty demanding bosses. But then again, no
(29:26):
one's ever accused the g men of being jolly.
Speaker 6 (29:30):
I've never heard anybody say that an FBI agent was
observed laughing at any feings.
Speaker 3 (29:37):
My experience was that FBI agents did not have a
sense of humor. At least they didn't think my jokes
were funny.
Speaker 1 (29:44):
It may have been silly, but the residents of Palellton
Village were making a point. They now knew every tactic
in the FBI's paranoia playbook, and it wasn't going to
work on them. And at that fair, posing for a
picture with his family. Alongside the cardboard cutout j Edgar
Hoover was none other than Bill Davidan, the mastermind of
(30:05):
the burglary. As the FBI bumbled its way through the investigation,
Bill created a new role for himself the unofficial burglary spokesperson.
He talked to the press and discussed the files at
academic conferences. He'd never admitted to being a burglar, let
alone the mastermind, just a concerned citizen who wanted to
spread the word about what was in those files. Bill
(30:28):
Davidan was hiding in plain sight. It was kind of brilliant,
definitely ballsy, but also a bit baffling to his accomplices,
who felt that a better place for him to hide
might have been. I don't know, out of sight entirely.
Here's Bill.
Speaker 14 (30:46):
I thought it was important to have outreach, and John
was very opposed to that. You know, he was very
uneasy about sort of being publicly involved in discendating information
about media. And I guess my feeling is something illegal
about doing that, so why not?
Speaker 15 (31:04):
Yeah, but it also seems as though it might attract
it's important to avoid this cloak and dagger atmosphere.
Speaker 1 (31:16):
But for the rest of the burglars. The heat of
the Medburg investigation was more menacing, and soon some of
them would come to face the agents hunting them.
Speaker 4 (31:33):
We were trying to go back to our normal lives,
but it was just it was the elephant in the room.
As they say, there were things to be scared about.
You don't know for sure, you don't know one hundred percent,
so you worry about that.
Speaker 16 (31:48):
But I'm at home. I thought I never loved that
I had started with.
Speaker 1 (31:55):
The Day after the burglary, Sarah Schumer realized she had
lost one of her gloves.
Speaker 16 (32:01):
Did that mean that I had put my hand on
door jams and whatnot? Without it on the head fingerprints?
Speaker 1 (32:08):
For weeks, Sarah couldn't think of anything else. Day by day,
hour by hour, she retraced her steps in her head,
again and again. At what point that night did she
lose that glove? She couldn't sleep. Some days, she couldn't eat.
Sarah describes it like the feeling you have when you're
far from home and suddenly start wondering if you left
(32:28):
the oven on. But this time she couldn't go back
and check. Sarah didn't yet know that the FBI had
recovered a partial palm print from the office.
Speaker 16 (32:38):
And then the next morning, I got a phone call
from the FBI that they wanted to interview me, and
I called two faculty friends to come down to my office.
Speaker 1 (32:49):
Sarah told the agents she talked to them, but only
in the presence of her friends, and only if they
let her use a tape recorder.
Speaker 16 (32:56):
And I said no, that would not be acceptable. They said, well,
then you don't have any questions for you.
Speaker 1 (33:02):
So yeah, they clearly weren't the world's best burglar catchers,
but when it came to sewing fear, the FBI was
the best in the game.
Speaker 9 (33:12):
So I'm at my job and I get page downstairs.
Speaker 1 (33:18):
Bobby have two visitors. They have crew cuts and wingtip shoes.
Speaker 9 (33:23):
So I went downstairs and my visitors were these two
FBI agents, and you know, they suggested that we go
outside and talk, and they escorted me to a car
that was parked right outside the office.
Speaker 1 (33:38):
They asked Bob to get in the car. Then the
agent stirred to him and asked, Bob, do you know
anything about this burglary and media?
Speaker 9 (33:47):
You know, I'd read all those documents. I knew what
they were doing. If they're going to arrest you. They're
going to arrest you right away. And if they're not
going to arrest you, they just want to see if
they can get information out of you. And your best
strategy is to refuse to say anything. That's another one
of those pesky constitutional rights. You don't have to talk
to them in this case, I said, Fellas, I'm sorry
(34:13):
to disappoint you, but I'm just not going to say
anything that you guys want to hear. You might as
well just take me home.
Speaker 1 (34:22):
Bob waited for the agent to ask for directions, but
instead the agent merely nodded to the driver. He drove
right up to the spot.
Speaker 9 (34:31):
They knew exactly where I lived, and I hope we've
lived there for a couple of weeks.
Speaker 1 (34:39):
One day, not long after the burglary, John and Bonnie
Rains had an unexpected visitor.
Speaker 4 (34:45):
The ninth member of the group who dropped out showed
up at our front door nine and so we invited
him in and he said that he wanted to talk
to us because he had heard from someone that there
were documents that had to do with missile silos and
(35:07):
he was very concerned about that.
Speaker 1 (35:09):
John and Bonnie promised him there was nothing about missile
silos in the media files, but the ninth Burglar was convinced.
He said he was worried the group would leak sensitive
files that would threaten national security. And then he said,
I'm thinking of turning you in.
Speaker 4 (35:26):
Didn't want him to see us freak out, but we
were freaking out.
Speaker 1 (35:30):
I don't know what you'd do in this situation, but
I can pretty much guarantee you would not do what
John did hire the guy to come back the next
weekend to paint his kitchen.
Speaker 4 (35:41):
The kitchen didn't need painting, it.
Speaker 1 (35:44):
Was, in fact a ruse. The ninth Burglar returned the
following weekend, and as they spent the afternoon rolling on
a fresh coat of yellow, John tried to find out
where Number nine's paranoia was really coming from.
Speaker 4 (35:57):
So, John, how did you hear this? And he said
that his girlfriend told him that. And John said, well,
how long has she been your girlfriend? And he said, oh,
I don't know, three or four months. And John said,
have you thought about the fact that she might be
an FBI informant? And his eyes sort of popped wide
(36:21):
open like that, and John said, I can assure you
that there were no documents of that nature whatsoever.
Speaker 1 (36:30):
Number nine left covered in paint and seeming to trust
that his friends wouldn't endanger the safety of the nation.
At least for now. John and Bonnie's nerves were fried.
They weren't out of the woods. There was still the
possibility they could be caught, that their children might be
(36:50):
left without parents over the coming weeks. They worried that
Number nine might still turn them in. And then there
was a knock on the door.
Speaker 8 (37:02):
There were two of them, you know, the nice guy
on the mean guy, And it was exactly at the game.
Speaker 1 (37:07):
John had just returned from playing tennis, which was lucky
because he needed a minute to think.
Speaker 8 (37:13):
When I first came in, I was assuming that my
tennis clothes.
Speaker 4 (37:16):
I was all swear.
Speaker 8 (37:18):
I'd gone upstairs to shower and left them alone downstairs
for fifteen times WHI I was shower.
Speaker 1 (37:25):
He came downstairs, fresh as a daisy and ready to bluff.
Speaker 8 (37:29):
They were investigating the media break yet, and they want
to know, do I know anything about that?
Speaker 1 (37:36):
John being? John launched into a filibuster. Did he know
about the files? Of course he did. Everybody knew about him.
He turned the interrogation into a lecture, you gm in
ought to be ashamed of yourselves, and you need to
be out.
Speaker 8 (37:50):
There, you know, looking at major crimes.
Speaker 17 (37:52):
And at the end of the interview, they said, by
the way, you didn't have anything to do with this, didue?
But my answer was I said, well, I feel so angry.
Speaker 8 (38:02):
About what I found out from the papers that I
don't want to make your search for people any easier,
So I'm not going to say what I was or not.
Speaker 1 (38:14):
Just minutes after the agents left, probably regretting talking to
John in the first place, Bonnie rains the unknown walk
in walked in. If John had kept the agents even longer,
they would have run right into their number one target,
the Get Me That Woman woman. She and John spent
the next twenty minutes making sure the agents hadn't left
any secret recording devices. As the weeks passed and the
(38:43):
FBI continued to circle, John and Bonnie decided to take
a step back. This incredible heist, which so far they'd
gotten away with, would be their last criminal enterprise. Meanwhile,
Sarah Schumer continued to lose sleep thinking about that glove.
Speaker 16 (39:01):
I didn't know whether anybody else was being questioned by
the FBI or whether I was the only one that
they were tracking down, and if I was the only one,
why was that? And as was it because I left
Prince and nobody else did so is isolating.
Speaker 1 (39:17):
The burglar's secret and their fear of it getting out
created a special kind of isolation. There was simply no
one for them to turn to to process this intense experience.
This isolation, and the ever present threat of the FBI
led Judy Finegold to make the most drastic choice of all.
She left Philadelphia forever. She and her new love interest,
(39:39):
sorry Bob, simply packed up and headed west.
Speaker 4 (39:44):
I just wanted to get out of town.
Speaker 6 (39:47):
I didn't have a plot or a plan.
Speaker 4 (39:50):
We just went wes.
Speaker 1 (39:53):
Judy found her way to New Mexico and began living
under an assumed name, severing connections to everyone she knew,
even her parents. After everything that had gone down, she
says she just had a feeling that sooner or later
someone might slip up.
Speaker 10 (40:09):
I really didn't trust that. After a while, like people
would start getting relax and say, oh, yeah, you know,
You're at some party and somebody'll say, oh yeah, yeah, yeah,
I remember, you know, Bob said, you know, and they
got the media files, you know, so I just decided
to leave, and it was absolutely terribly painful, you know.
Speaker 6 (40:35):
It was.
Speaker 1 (40:37):
After a few months, the media files were no longer
making news. By May, the burglars had released all of
the relevant stolen documents. Betty Metzger had nothing new to
report on, and to make matters worse.
Speaker 13 (40:50):
Senator Dole, the Republican chairman, accused the Democrats of trying
to make the FBI look like an American guestapo.
Speaker 1 (40:59):
Congress declined to investigate. Hoover had avoided a congressional investigation
for now, but President Nixon had started to view him
as a liability. So one day in late nineteen seventy one,
Nixon decided he'd had enough. He was finally going to
fire J. Edgar Hoover. Here's Professor Daniel Chard.
Speaker 2 (41:22):
He arranged his whole special breakfast with Hoover where he
was going to try to break the news.
Speaker 1 (41:28):
Hmm, you smell that. That's just the scent of waffles
and bacon and me finally getting rid of your ass.
Nixon didn't actually tell Hoover he was fired. He offered
him the opportunity to retire with dignity and let a
new FBI director make a fresh start. But even at
the age of seventy six, coming off the worst scandal
(41:48):
of his career, Hoover called Nixon's bluff.
Speaker 2 (41:52):
And Hoover was just too slick. Hoover said, I would
be happy to go into retirement if you would put
in that you would like me to do that, And
Nixon realizes he's not going to do that. He doesn't
want to put that in writing because Hoover is so popular,
especially among the conservative base.
Speaker 1 (42:11):
When the breakfast ended, Hoover was still the director of
the FBI. Nixon had even agreed to increase the bureau's
personnel budget. Even now fighting for his job, as his
men flailed around desperately interrogating every hippie in the greater
Philadelphia area. Hoover was a force to be reckoned with.
And even though his g mens blanket surveillance tactics had
(42:34):
allowed most of the culprits to slip right through their
fingers undetected, they still had some tricks up their sleeves.
Speaker 9 (42:41):
And then I hear this guy yelled.
Speaker 1 (42:44):
Freeze coming up on snappho.
Speaker 3 (42:49):
They came to the doors, guns drawn and put us
up against the wall.
Speaker 1 (42:54):
The FBI arrested twenty persons in Camden.
Speaker 14 (42:56):
New Jersey, early today and charged them with trying to
steal draftra and the federal building there.
Speaker 9 (43:02):
Forty seven years would have been the maximum.
Speaker 6 (43:05):
There was this feeling that nothing actually would happen in
terms of Hoover having to face the music. It felt
like the end at that time, but it wasn't the end.
Speaker 1 (43:23):
Snafoo is a production of iHeartRadio, Film Nation Entertainment, and
Pacific Electric Picture Company in association with Gilded Audio. This
season of Snafoo is based on the book of the Burglary,
The Discovery of j Edgar Hoover's Secret FBI, written by
Betty Metzger. It's executive produced by me Ed Helms, Milan Papelka,
Mike Valbo, Whitney Donaldson, Andy Chug, Dylan Fagan, and Betty Metzger.
(43:47):
Our lead producers are Sarah Joyner and Alyssa Martino. Producer
is Stephen Wood. This episode was written by Albert Chen,
Sarah Joyner, and Stephen Wood, with additional writing and story
editing from Alissa Martino and Ed Helms. Tory Smith is
our associate producer. Nevin Calla Poly is our production assistant
Facts checking by Charles Richter. Our creative executive is Brett Harris.
(44:09):
Sensitivity consult from Oloa Kemi Ala de Sui, Editing, sound
design and original music by Ben Chugg, Engineering and technical
direction by Nick Dooley. Additional editing from Kelsey Albright, Olivia
Canny and Jimma Castelli Foley theme music by Dan Rosatto.
Special thanks to Alison Cohen, Daniel Welsh and Ben Riizak.
Additional thanks to director Joanna Hamilton for letting us use
(44:32):
some of the original interviews from her incredible documentary nineteen
seventy one. Finally, our deepest gratitude to the courageous Citizens
Commission to Investigate the FBI, Bill Davidon, Ralph Daniel, Judy
fine Gold, Keith Forsyth, Bonnie Rains, John Rains, Sarah Schumer
and Bob Williamson,
Last time on Snapoo.
Speaker 2 (00:03):
We had picked the time to begin the actual action,
timing it to begin with the Ali Fraser fight.
Speaker 3 (00:11):
So I went to the door, mister confident, and there's
a second lock on the door that wasn't there like
two weeks before.
Speaker 4 (00:18):
We got this far, and we're just not going to
give up. And that's when I remembered the second door.
Speaker 5 (00:26):
Who anonymous.
Speaker 4 (00:36):
I was really jacked up. Can you believe it? We
pulled it off without a single hitch?
Speaker 6 (00:49):
Now, were you the first to a rhyme the morning?
Speaker 1 (00:52):
Yes?
Speaker 7 (00:53):
Yes, about seven seven thirty in the morning.
Speaker 1 (00:56):
Frank McLaughlin was an FBI agent based in Media, Pennsylvania,
in nineteen seventy one. On March ninth of that year,
he was the first one to arrive for work, where
his investigative acumen immediately told him is something wasn't right.
Speaker 7 (01:14):
I could tell the lock had been tampered with. I
could tell by looking at it. So then I automatically
looked at the second door, and that was that.
Speaker 8 (01:22):
You are.
Speaker 7 (01:25):
What do you think I suspected that there was a Berkeley?
I mean, yeah, I've been in this business a lot
of years.
Speaker 1 (01:33):
Inside, he astutely noted a few more telltale clues. For example,
all of the documents in the entire office were missing.
Speaker 7 (01:43):
The doors were open and the files were gone. And
I walked into my office a destroyers were rifled. It's
a place that was ramsacked.
Speaker 1 (01:53):
From there, a series of bewildered g men passed the
message up the chain of command. Before Whover even arrived
at his office that morning, his underlings had already enlisted
one of his most trusted agents, Deputy Associate Director Mark Felt.
If that name sounds familiar, it's because a few years later,
Felt would leak evidence about Watergate to the Washington Post.
(02:15):
For that he's better known to the world as Deep Throat.
Speaker 6 (02:19):
That was after a famous porn movie at the.
Speaker 1 (02:22):
Time, Thanks Betty. Anyway, in nineteen seventy one, Felt was
a highly respected g man, the kind the other g
men turned to when the unthinkable happened.
Speaker 6 (02:37):
Mark Felt was in New York and he was shaving
in his hotel room when he got a call telling
him that there was an emergency in the FBI.
Speaker 1 (02:48):
Felt canceled his meetings in New York. He caught the
next train down to Philadelphia. He hustled from Philly's thirtieth
Street station to the FBI office at one Veteran Square
in Media. He strode into the office, took charge, and
immediately got to work covering his own ass.
Speaker 6 (03:04):
So when Mark Felt arrived that morning, he immediately focused
on the safe in the office.
Speaker 1 (03:12):
That safe was the only unburgled thing in the whole office.
It contained the agent's firearms, but no files.
Speaker 6 (03:20):
He thought that this was ridiculous, this is where the
papers should have been kept.
Speaker 1 (03:24):
Yeah, funny thing about that the lead agent and media
had put in a request for a larger safe just
the year before. He specifically noted that not having one
left his office vulnerable to burglars. That request landed on
the desk of Deputy Associate Director Mark Felt.
Speaker 6 (03:41):
The other thing that he asked Felt for was an
alarm system, an alarm system that would be connected to
the police. Felt had turned him down on both of
these things. When he asked why they couldn't have an
alarm system, he said that they were so close to
the local police station that that just wasn't necessary.
Speaker 1 (04:05):
You're close to a police station. If you get burgled,
just scream, they'll hear you.
Speaker 6 (04:10):
And instead of a very large safe, he provided them
with a very small safe.
Speaker 1 (04:18):
We'll never know. I Felt realized in that moment that
this whole snapfoo was kind of his fault. But before
he got to work searching for the culprits, he found
something more important, someone to take the fall the lead
agent in Media, who was sadly reassigned to Atlanta.
Speaker 6 (04:37):
Hoover, urged by Mark Felt, had gotten rid of the
person in the office who knew the most about the
area and probably could have been most helpful in conducting
the investigation. Instead of Deep Throat, they were considering a
nickname that morning. It would be deep Scapegoader.
Speaker 1 (04:59):
Suffice to to say, this was not the FBI's finest hour.
A reporter later described Hoover as quote apoplectic when he
heard about the burglary. Within hours, the director had assigned
over two hundred agents to a new operation to track
down and arrest the culprits. The secret code name for
this operation medburgh medburg.
Speaker 6 (05:21):
I mean it was just a combination of media, meed,
and burglary.
Speaker 1 (05:26):
What a cute portmanteau. For the first time in its history,
classified Bureau documents had fallen into outside hands, but for now,
at least those documents remained secret. Hoover's FBI was in
a race against the clock, and the orders were clear,
find these anonymous burglars before an embarrassment became a catastrophe.
(05:54):
I'm Ed Helms and this is Snafu, a show about
history's greatest screw ups. This is Season two Medburg the
story of a daring heist and the colossal FBI snaffoo
it exposed. Today, the FBI hunts the burglars Todd.
Speaker 5 (06:22):
Haof Hao.
Speaker 1 (06:30):
In the dead of night, hours before Frank McLaughlin would
even discover the crime scene. The burglars sat in a
Quaker farmhouse in the Pennsylvania Woods with pages and pages
of loot. As the adrenaline wore off, it was time
to see what they had scored. They separated the documents
into piles and dug in.
Speaker 9 (06:49):
I think we all trusted each other to know what
was important and what wasn't. Judy and I worked together.
They had a little shed off of the main cabin.
But I remember Judy and I spending a lot of
time in that shed and holding hands and but working too.
Speaker 10 (07:09):
I thought it was very romantic to go through the
files and decide, you know, which ones you weren't gonna copy.
Speaker 11 (07:19):
Yeah, some files were boring and some were strange, like
the memo that informed overweight agents they'd be subject to
weekly weigh ins until they lost the extra pounds, or
the one that instructed agents on the proper protocol for
observing j Edgar Hoover's birthday. Who would have guessed this
guy was more of a birthday diva than my five
year old niece. An hour passed, and the burglars were
(07:44):
undoubtedly feeling nervous that they had just risked everything to
steal a bunch of nothing.
Speaker 1 (07:52):
And then.
Speaker 4 (07:53):
I remember someone in the other room said, you've got
to come and see this.
Speaker 1 (08:00):
The whole team stopped what they were doing and gathered
around one document. Hearts pounding, they took turns reading. It
was a memo from headquarters to all FBI agents. The
memo instructed agents to conduct interviews with anti war activists,
not for the purpose of investigating any illegal activity, but
rather in.
Speaker 4 (08:20):
Order to enhance the paranoia. They were to give the
impression that there was an FBI agent behind every mailbox.
Speaker 10 (08:29):
And it was like, at last something, That's what they wanted.
They wanted people to think that there was a boogeyman
behind every mailbox.
Speaker 6 (08:38):
We had some idea that this was pretty explosive.
Speaker 1 (08:43):
They kept reading, and soon the floodgates opened.
Speaker 3 (08:49):
It was just a constant stream of people saying, oh, man,
look at this, and then everybody would stop and look
up and they would read something, you know, and then
a couple of minutes later somebody would say, holy Macro,
you're not going to believe this.
Speaker 1 (09:02):
One file detailed the movements and grades of a congressman's daughter.
Speaker 12 (09:07):
The records indicated that during the spring semester of nineteen
sixty nine, she attended the AutoMac.
Speaker 1 (09:12):
Who was being surveilled because she, like her parents, opposed
the Vietnam War.
Speaker 12 (09:17):
Where major is fringe and as many courses.
Speaker 1 (09:19):
Another conversation was picked up by a phone tap on
the Black Panther Party's Philadelphia office. The tap didn't appear
to have picked up anything illegal, but agents had taken
scrupulous notes. As one panther phoned his mom to ask
for bus fare, he.
Speaker 12 (09:33):
Asked his mother to send him seventeen dollars to get home.
Speaker 1 (09:36):
They'd also intercepted a letter from a Boy Scout troop
leader asking the Soviet embassy about the possibility of taking
his troop to Russia for a camping trip next summer.
Speaker 12 (09:45):
We would like very much to go to the Soviet
Union to travel through your country and meet our counterparts
in the USSR, if possible.
Speaker 1 (09:51):
Another file alleged quote communist infiltration of a local women's.
Speaker 12 (09:56):
Group, Martin Luther King Junior, who will address the fiftieth
anniversary banquet?
Speaker 1 (09:59):
Be the nature of that infiltration. Martin Luther King Junior
had been invited to speak at their upcoming banquet.
Speaker 12 (10:06):
Copies of the names and biographical data are attached here too.
Speaker 1 (10:10):
A local civil rights leader, Mohammad Kanyata, was also being surveiled.
Speaker 12 (10:14):
There are two persons authorized to sign checks on this account,
and they are Mohammed Kanyata and Mary Kenyata.
Speaker 1 (10:20):
Again, there was zero evidence of criminal activity in his file,
but the FBI had obtained records of his phone calls
and bank transactions.
Speaker 12 (10:29):
The Peltan's account was forty four dollars and thirty two cents.
Speaker 1 (10:33):
As they kept reading, the burglars realized banks, employers, landlords,
utility companies, local police, and individual busybodies had all happily
collaborated with the FBI to surveil their friends and associates,
no subpoenas, no warrants, and absolutely zero consideration for privacy.
Speaker 12 (10:53):
Will continue to monitor bank account of National Black Economic
Development Conference in Southeast National Bank, followed by copies of
bank statements.
Speaker 1 (11:00):
Kiseled chicks and While the targets ranged from women's lib
groups to boy Scout troops, the FBI was clearly preoccupied
with black activists. They weren't just tapping the phones of
the Black Panthers and leaders like Kenyata. Every single black
student at Swafmore College was under surveillance. When they finally
(11:28):
got through all the files, the burglars tallied up what
they'd found. Forty percent of the cases in the Media
office dealt with surveillance of legal political activity. By contrast,
investigations of murders, rapes, and interstate crimes constituted just twenty
percent of the files, and a measly one percent dealt
with organized crime. If the Media office was any indication,
(11:52):
spying on law abiding citizens was the FBI's number one priority,
The stolen files mostly FBI surveillance activity in the Philadelphia area.
Speaker 6 (12:03):
Oh, it was all horrifying. It was horrifying, but.
Speaker 1 (12:07):
It was clear that the mandates were being sent to
FBI offices nationwide.
Speaker 9 (12:11):
I think we all felt disgusted.
Speaker 1 (12:13):
One memo came directly from Hoover, directing all offices to
surveil black student unions on every single college campus in
the country.
Speaker 9 (12:21):
I had no particular admiration for the FBI at that point,
but that was a new low not even I had imagined.
Speaker 1 (12:29):
And Hoover said their activity posed a quote definite threat
to the nation's stability and security. They didn't realize it yet,
but the single most important document the burglars had stolen
was a simple routing slip at the top in big
block letters was a code word, which at the time
(12:50):
meant nothing to the burglars. Co intel pro A single
code word on a single page in a mountain of files,
a needle in a haystack, A needle so dangerous that
Hoover was prepared to do anything to catch these burglars
before that code word could see the light of day.
Speaker 8 (13:25):
I must have been about what six point thirty in
the morning, and I stopped to a paypall on at
Chestnut Hill at a gas station. The whole place was empty.
Speaker 1 (13:35):
I before they could finally return home to their children.
John and Bonnie Rains had one more task. They pulled
up to a gas station and Bonnie waited in the
car as John made a phone call. In his hand
was a statement announcing what the Citizens Commissioned to Investigate
the FBI had just done.
Speaker 8 (13:53):
We'd written a common statement and this was to be
read to the writer's fellow.
Speaker 5 (13:58):
Well, I was dead the phone.
Speaker 1 (14:02):
That's Bill Winzel, the reuters fella, Yeah, the phone.
Speaker 5 (14:05):
And the voice said, this is a Citizens Commission to
investigate the FBI. I thought, oh, this is going to
be interesting. Good Bill.
Speaker 1 (14:17):
On the night of March eighth, nineteen seventy one, the
Citizens Commissioned to Investigate the FBI removed files from the
media Pennsylvania Office of the FBI. These files will now
be studied to determine the nature and extent of surveillance.
Speaker 4 (14:31):
John was on the phone with the reporter reading the statement,
and I was waiting in the car and a police
car pulls up into the gas station. He was curious,
I guess about what we were doing at that time
of the night on a public phone.
Speaker 1 (14:45):
The police car crept by. The officer peered at John.
John spotted the car, but he kept reading. His hand
trembled holding a piece of paper that contained his confession
to a federal.
Speaker 4 (14:58):
Crime, and we just absolutely freaked out.
Speaker 1 (15:03):
The police car kept moving and slowly drove away. John
continued reading, we have taken this action because we believe
that democracy can survive only in an order of justice,
of an open society and public trust. And then the
police car returned, driving even more slowly this time.
Speaker 4 (15:25):
I was really afraid at that point, because John had
that piece of paper right there in front of him
in the phone booth.
Speaker 1 (15:32):
She leaned over and banged on the window to get
John's attention, her expression clearly conveying a message every spouse understands,
hurry the up. But even with the cops checking him
out and Bonnie glaring at him, John dictated the entire letter.
He had a cover story just in case if the
police bothered him, he'd just pretend he was on the
(15:53):
phone with his bookie. He catched the fight last night.
Officer John continued reading the statement. In doing this, we
know full well the legal jeopardy in which we place ourselves.
We feel most keenly our responsibilities to those who daily
depend on us, and whom we put in jeopardy by
our own jeopardy. But under the present circumstances, this seems
(16:13):
to us our best way of loving and serving them,
and in fact, all the people of this land, the
citizens commissioned to investigate the FBI. As John finished and
hung up the phone, the police car drove off and disappeared.
This time it did not come back. Mission accomplished, John
(16:35):
and Bonnie drove home.
Speaker 4 (16:37):
We tore the statement up and threw it out the
window and went home to our kids.
Speaker 1 (16:45):
As the scraps of paper fluttered to the ground, John
and Bonnie laughed with glee or perhaps sleep deprivation. Meanwhile, Bill,
the Reuter's fellow, was wide awake. He just had a
bombshell dropped right into his hands.
Speaker 5 (17:00):
I knew I was going to have to call the
FBI to tell them I had gotten the call, and
I needed confirmation that all your files had been stole.
Speaker 1 (17:14):
Bill expected the FBI to give him the run around,
or a simple no comment.
Speaker 5 (17:19):
You know, they could have said what not answering questions,
but they didn't. They confirmed it, and trustfully, at this
point they're looking pretty bad.
Speaker 1 (17:32):
He laughs now. But Bill would soon realize this phone
call made him a suspect. In the coming weeks, he'd
be stalked by FBI agents. According to him, one actually
punched him in the stomach. Bill could only corroborate basic
details with the FBI. His story ran in The New
York Times the next day, around fifty words in total,
(17:55):
buried on page seven. The story acknowledged that a burglary
had taken place, but said nothing about the nature of
the records that were stolen. Hoover still had time to
catch the burglars before they spilled his secrets. After the
(18:17):
burglars sorted through the files, it was time to share
them with the world. They packaged up copies of the documents,
addressed them to two congressmen and three reporters, and dropped
them in the mailbox. The return label read Liberty Publications Media, Pennsylvania.
At that point, Bonnie says, it was out of their hands.
Speaker 4 (18:38):
We had to depend on courageous journalists and editors to
do their job. Then that was just one more thing
to be anxious about. Would they So we just had
to hope, and we had to wait and see what
the reaction of the general public would be to the
truth about the FBI.
Speaker 1 (18:57):
The burglars would later learn that the congressmen and who'd
received the files had immediately turned them right back over
to the FBI, but not Betty Metzker. She retrieved her
mail at the Washington Post, found a mysterious envelope, and
met the moment head on.
Speaker 13 (19:15):
FBI records stolen from the media Pennsylvania office showed that
one goal of a bureau was to spread that very
impression among left wing organizations that there was an agent
behind every mail box.
Speaker 1 (19:28):
The FBI was falling out of public favor for pretty
much the first time ever, not only for its questionable ethics,
but also for its questionable effectiveness. A New York Times
editorial read quote, little confidence is inspired by the security
measures of a security agency whose files can be so
easily burglarized. Here's burglar. Ralph Daniel I was also real excited,
(19:52):
because we did have some concern that this funky little
outpost for the fbi't wasn't going to have much.
Speaker 6 (19:59):
But we knew, we knew this was dynamite stuff.
Speaker 4 (20:03):
After we mailed the documents, our job was done.
Speaker 1 (20:07):
This was moving along unbelievably well. When the Citizens commissioned
to investigate the FBI met at the farmhouse for the
last time. They renewed the vow they had made at
the start they would never tell a living soul what
(20:29):
they had done.
Speaker 5 (20:31):
We decided we're not getting together as a group ever again.
We really parted ways.
Speaker 1 (20:38):
Apart from John and Bonnie, who continued to be married,
the rest of the crew knew their best chance of
staying safe was to stay apart. No more dinners, no
more phone calls, no returning to media every March for
a reunion barbecue.
Speaker 4 (20:52):
We absolutely could not be in contact with each other
at all. I'm sure that bothered me to some extent,
but that's the way it had to be. It's just
the way it had to be.
Speaker 1 (21:06):
And so the burglars left the Quaker Farmhouse in the
Woods one last time. The Citizens Commission to Investigate the
FBI was effectively dissolved, but the FBI's hunt for them,
code named Medburg, was just getting started, and soon the
g men would come a knocking. When the Washington Post
(21:35):
published the contents of those first media files, j Edgar
Hoover was livid. His only consolation was that the story
could have been way worse. The story revealed the FBI
wanted to make activists paranoid to think there was a
quote FBI agent behind every mailbox. But the article made
no mention of Hoover's biggest liability, the code word co
(21:57):
intel pro. For all he knew, it was just a
matter of time. Hoover needed to catch those burglars fast.
The document containing the infamous agent behind every mailbox line
was basically an instruction manual for how to interrogate anti
war activists. It also included the following quote, some will
(22:18):
be overcome by the overwhelming personalities of the contacting agent
and volunteer to tell all. So there you have it.
All the g men had to do was contact some activists,
overwhelm them with personality, and the suspects would spill their guts.
Let's see how that went. I'm going to read you
some of the actual reports agents sent to headquarters. Two
(22:44):
director from Indianapolis checked on the whereabouts of a man
from Bloomington who agents thought might quote do such a thing.
Two director from Newark possible suspect found by the Red Bank,
New Jersey office a long haired person sitting in a car.
Two director from Philadelphia visited local commune Farkal Farm. The
(23:06):
commune is primarily engaged in drug and sex activities. However,
they could definitely still know something. Okay, buddy, better stay
put there at Farkel Farm, see if you can get
some good inter court I mean. Intel agents had recovered
a partial palm print from the media office, found on
(23:29):
the side of the large filing cabinet. They sent it
to the lab and waited for results. Their strongest lead
was the Unknown walk In, a college girl who had
visited the office weeks before the burglary, ostensibly for a
newspaper article. They had to call her the unknown walk In,
of course, because none of the agents thought to ask
(23:49):
for her name. That really pissed Hoover off. He made
it objective number one for the agents to find that woman.
Speaker 4 (23:58):
Find me that.
Speaker 1 (24:02):
The agents who saw Bonnie in the office that day
worked with a Philadelphia sketch artist to drop a picture
to distribute to agents nationwide. The quality of the sketch
was well, just imagine someone handed you a picture of
an oval and said, go find this egg.
Speaker 4 (24:18):
I laughed. I just laughed and laughed. It was pretty funny.
It's almost like a cartoon.
Speaker 1 (24:25):
Accompanying the sketch was a written description apparently Bonnie's coat
was quote soiled and in need of cleaning and pressing,
and her hair was quote apparently not well combed or
well kept. Were you offended by their description?
Speaker 4 (24:40):
Yeah, I was a little offended. We just knew that
Hoover was beside himself that this had happened.
Speaker 3 (24:51):
Well, I mean, that was no surprise. I mean, two
seconds after Bill suggested the idea, I'm like, they really
gonna be pissed if we pull this off.
Speaker 4 (25:03):
He dispatched two hundred agents to flood the Philadelphia area
to find us.
Speaker 1 (25:12):
Powelton Village is a neighborhood in West Philadelphia filled with
red brick townhouses. In nineteen seventy one, it was a
hotbed of anti war activism. Hoover was certain that if
the burglars were to be found, they'd be found here,
and he was actually right. More than half of the
burglars did live in Powelton Village at the time. Judy
(25:32):
was one of them.
Speaker 10 (25:34):
We knew that we were poking the hornet's nest.
Speaker 6 (25:37):
I mean we knew it.
Speaker 10 (25:39):
We had a lot of heat, you know, everybody was
being intimidated.
Speaker 1 (25:44):
Mostly the g men just sat in their cars for
weeks on end, equipped with long lens cameras watching, and
whether or not somebody was actively involved in anti war
protests didn't really seem to matter to these agents. At
least one resident learned that the heart Way, I.
Speaker 4 (26:01):
Haven't been active in resistance politics or anything, and yet
you know, twelve armed agents broke into my house.
Speaker 6 (26:08):
Throughout that time, very seldom did they figure out actual
information that could lead to arrest. They really lost their
ability to be sharp at solving crimes, and they did
outrageous things instead. And this kind of just massive surveillance.
(26:29):
By sitting in the cars, it's very unlikely you're going
to get information that tells you anything about who broke
into that FBI office.
Speaker 1 (26:41):
This approach was classic Hoover. It was more or less
the same tactic that had been revealed in the media files.
Surveil everyone all the time in what's known as blanket surveillance.
It was exhaustive, time consuming, and generated so much information
that it became impossible to suss out which bits actually mattered.
Blanket surveillance is great for intimidation, but for crime solving
(27:06):
not so much.
Speaker 8 (27:08):
So.
Speaker 3 (27:08):
There were so many agents hanging around village that somebody
in the community decided the way to fight back was
to make fun of them.
Speaker 1 (27:19):
For example, when agents inevitably fell asleep in their cars, a.
Speaker 6 (27:23):
Local resident would stand beside an FBI car and blow
a bullhorn as another residence stood on the other side
of the FBI car with a tray of freshly baked
cookies and milk ready for the agents as they jolded
awake after the bullhorns sound. I don't know if any
(27:47):
agents ever accepted the cookies into milk.
Speaker 1 (27:50):
Somebody also had the brilliant idea to go around and
slap bumper stickers on all the surveillance cars that said
this is an FBI car. And then there was the
street fair.
Speaker 6 (28:05):
They called it Your FBI in Action Street Fair.
Speaker 1 (28:09):
The fair was a spectacle planned by the residents of
Powellton Village to make a mockery of Hoover's FBI. Copies
of the stolen media files, which by now had gotten around,
were nailed to trees. You could get your picture taken
with a life sized cardboard cutout of j Edgar Hoover.
There were skits too, yes open up FBI wa kids
(28:32):
assembled jigsaw puzzles depicting FBI agents sleeping in their cars.
What can I say? It was a family affair. There
were even musical performances captured by a film crew from
the Educational Broadcasting Corporation.
Speaker 7 (28:45):
They know it you are, They know if you are streets,
they know if you.
Speaker 13 (28:53):
Are land all right, And if you plan to smash
the state.
Speaker 8 (29:00):
Better are not crown.
Speaker 10 (29:01):
You better not smiled, You better.
Speaker 1 (29:03):
Not see love me while Edgar Hoover's hanging. Oh no, no, no,
you know. I never really thought about the similarities between
Hoover and Santa before, but I guess they were both
surveillance experts, both pretty demanding bosses. But then again, no
(29:26):
one's ever accused the g men of being jolly.
Speaker 6 (29:30):
I've never heard anybody say that an FBI agent was
observed laughing at any feings.
Speaker 3 (29:37):
My experience was that FBI agents did not have a
sense of humor. At least they didn't think my jokes
were funny.
Speaker 1 (29:44):
It may have been silly, but the residents of Palellton
Village were making a point. They now knew every tactic
in the FBI's paranoia playbook, and it wasn't going to
work on them. And at that fair, posing for a
picture with his family. Alongside the cardboard cutout j Edgar
Hoover was none other than Bill Davidan, the mastermind of
(30:05):
the burglary. As the FBI bumbled its way through the investigation,
Bill created a new role for himself the unofficial burglary spokesperson.
He talked to the press and discussed the files at
academic conferences. He'd never admitted to being a burglar, let
alone the mastermind, just a concerned citizen who wanted to
spread the word about what was in those files. Bill
(30:28):
Davidan was hiding in plain sight. It was kind of brilliant,
definitely ballsy, but also a bit baffling to his accomplices,
who felt that a better place for him to hide
might have been. I don't know, out of sight entirely.
Here's Bill.
Speaker 14 (30:46):
I thought it was important to have outreach, and John
was very opposed to that. You know, he was very
uneasy about sort of being publicly involved in discendating information
about media. And I guess my feeling is something illegal
about doing that, so why not?
Speaker 15 (31:04):
Yeah, but it also seems as though it might attract
it's important to avoid this cloak and dagger atmosphere.
Speaker 1 (31:16):
But for the rest of the burglars. The heat of
the Medburg investigation was more menacing, and soon some of
them would come to face the agents hunting them.
Speaker 4 (31:33):
We were trying to go back to our normal lives,
but it was just it was the elephant in the room.
As they say, there were things to be scared about.
You don't know for sure, you don't know one hundred percent,
so you worry about that.
Speaker 16 (31:48):
But I'm at home. I thought I never loved that
I had started with.
Speaker 1 (31:55):
The Day after the burglary, Sarah Schumer realized she had
lost one of her gloves.
Speaker 16 (32:01):
Did that mean that I had put my hand on
door jams and whatnot? Without it on the head fingerprints?
Speaker 1 (32:08):
For weeks, Sarah couldn't think of anything else. Day by day,
hour by hour, she retraced her steps in her head,
again and again. At what point that night did she
lose that glove? She couldn't sleep. Some days, she couldn't eat.
Sarah describes it like the feeling you have when you're
far from home and suddenly start wondering if you left
(32:28):
the oven on. But this time she couldn't go back
and check. Sarah didn't yet know that the FBI had
recovered a partial palm print from the office.
Speaker 16 (32:38):
And then the next morning, I got a phone call
from the FBI that they wanted to interview me, and
I called two faculty friends to come down to my office.
Speaker 1 (32:49):
Sarah told the agents she talked to them, but only
in the presence of her friends, and only if they
let her use a tape recorder.
Speaker 16 (32:56):
And I said no, that would not be acceptable. They said, well,
then you don't have any questions for you.
Speaker 1 (33:02):
So yeah, they clearly weren't the world's best burglar catchers,
but when it came to sewing fear, the FBI was
the best in the game.
Speaker 9 (33:12):
So I'm at my job and I get page downstairs.
Speaker 1 (33:18):
Bobby have two visitors. They have crew cuts and wingtip shoes.
Speaker 9 (33:23):
So I went downstairs and my visitors were these two
FBI agents, and you know, they suggested that we go
outside and talk, and they escorted me to a car
that was parked right outside the office.
Speaker 1 (33:38):
They asked Bob to get in the car. Then the
agent stirred to him and asked, Bob, do you know
anything about this burglary and media?
Speaker 9 (33:47):
You know, I'd read all those documents. I knew what
they were doing. If they're going to arrest you. They're
going to arrest you right away. And if they're not
going to arrest you, they just want to see if
they can get information out of you. And your best
strategy is to refuse to say anything. That's another one
of those pesky constitutional rights. You don't have to talk
to them in this case, I said, Fellas, I'm sorry
(34:13):
to disappoint you, but I'm just not going to say
anything that you guys want to hear. You might as
well just take me home.
Speaker 1 (34:22):
Bob waited for the agent to ask for directions, but
instead the agent merely nodded to the driver. He drove
right up to the spot.
Speaker 9 (34:31):
They knew exactly where I lived, and I hope we've
lived there for a couple of weeks.
Speaker 1 (34:39):
One day, not long after the burglary, John and Bonnie
Rains had an unexpected visitor.
Speaker 4 (34:45):
The ninth member of the group who dropped out showed
up at our front door nine and so we invited
him in and he said that he wanted to talk
to us because he had heard from someone that there
were documents that had to do with missile silos and
(35:07):
he was very concerned about that.
Speaker 1 (35:09):
John and Bonnie promised him there was nothing about missile
silos in the media files, but the ninth Burglar was convinced.
He said he was worried the group would leak sensitive
files that would threaten national security. And then he said,
I'm thinking of turning you in.
Speaker 4 (35:26):
Didn't want him to see us freak out, but we
were freaking out.
Speaker 1 (35:30):
I don't know what you'd do in this situation, but
I can pretty much guarantee you would not do what
John did hire the guy to come back the next
weekend to paint his kitchen.
Speaker 4 (35:41):
The kitchen didn't need painting, it.
Speaker 1 (35:44):
Was, in fact a ruse. The ninth Burglar returned the
following weekend, and as they spent the afternoon rolling on
a fresh coat of yellow, John tried to find out
where Number nine's paranoia was really coming from.
Speaker 4 (35:57):
So, John, how did you hear this? And he said
that his girlfriend told him that. And John said, well,
how long has she been your girlfriend? And he said, oh,
I don't know, three or four months. And John said,
have you thought about the fact that she might be
an FBI informant? And his eyes sort of popped wide
(36:21):
open like that, and John said, I can assure you
that there were no documents of that nature whatsoever.
Speaker 1 (36:30):
Number nine left covered in paint and seeming to trust
that his friends wouldn't endanger the safety of the nation.
At least for now. John and Bonnie's nerves were fried.
They weren't out of the woods. There was still the
possibility they could be caught, that their children might be
(36:50):
left without parents over the coming weeks. They worried that
Number nine might still turn them in. And then there
was a knock on the door.
Speaker 8 (37:02):
There were two of them, you know, the nice guy
on the mean guy, And it was exactly at the game.
Speaker 1 (37:07):
John had just returned from playing tennis, which was lucky
because he needed a minute to think.
Speaker 8 (37:13):
When I first came in, I was assuming that my
tennis clothes.
Speaker 4 (37:16):
I was all swear.
Speaker 8 (37:18):
I'd gone upstairs to shower and left them alone downstairs
for fifteen times WHI I was shower.
Speaker 1 (37:25):
He came downstairs, fresh as a daisy and ready to bluff.
Speaker 8 (37:29):
They were investigating the media break yet, and they want
to know, do I know anything about that?
Speaker 1 (37:36):
John being? John launched into a filibuster. Did he know
about the files? Of course he did. Everybody knew about him.
He turned the interrogation into a lecture, you gm in
ought to be ashamed of yourselves, and you need to
be out.
Speaker 8 (37:50):
There, you know, looking at major crimes.
Speaker 17 (37:52):
And at the end of the interview, they said, by
the way, you didn't have anything to do with this, didue?
But my answer was I said, well, I feel so angry.
Speaker 8 (38:02):
About what I found out from the papers that I
don't want to make your search for people any easier,
So I'm not going to say what I was or not.
Speaker 1 (38:14):
Just minutes after the agents left, probably regretting talking to
John in the first place, Bonnie rains the unknown walk
in walked in. If John had kept the agents even longer,
they would have run right into their number one target,
the Get Me That Woman woman. She and John spent
the next twenty minutes making sure the agents hadn't left
any secret recording devices. As the weeks passed and the
(38:43):
FBI continued to circle, John and Bonnie decided to take
a step back. This incredible heist, which so far they'd
gotten away with, would be their last criminal enterprise. Meanwhile,
Sarah Schumer continued to lose sleep thinking about that glove.
Speaker 16 (39:01):
I didn't know whether anybody else was being questioned by
the FBI or whether I was the only one that
they were tracking down, and if I was the only one,
why was that? And as was it because I left
Prince and nobody else did so is isolating.
Speaker 1 (39:17):
The burglar's secret and their fear of it getting out
created a special kind of isolation. There was simply no
one for them to turn to to process this intense experience.
This isolation, and the ever present threat of the FBI
led Judy Finegold to make the most drastic choice of all.
She left Philadelphia forever. She and her new love interest,
(39:39):
sorry Bob, simply packed up and headed west.
Speaker 4 (39:44):
I just wanted to get out of town.
Speaker 6 (39:47):
I didn't have a plot or a plan.
Speaker 4 (39:50):
We just went wes.
Speaker 1 (39:53):
Judy found her way to New Mexico and began living
under an assumed name, severing connections to everyone she knew,
even her parents. After everything that had gone down, she
says she just had a feeling that sooner or later
someone might slip up.
Speaker 10 (40:09):
I really didn't trust that. After a while, like people
would start getting relax and say, oh, yeah, you know,
You're at some party and somebody'll say, oh yeah, yeah, yeah,
I remember, you know, Bob said, you know, and they
got the media files, you know, so I just decided
to leave, and it was absolutely terribly painful, you know.
Speaker 6 (40:35):
It was.
Speaker 1 (40:37):
After a few months, the media files were no longer
making news. By May, the burglars had released all of
the relevant stolen documents. Betty Metzger had nothing new to
report on, and to make matters worse.
Speaker 13 (40:50):
Senator Dole, the Republican chairman, accused the Democrats of trying
to make the FBI look like an American guestapo.
Speaker 1 (40:59):
Congress declined to investigate. Hoover had avoided a congressional investigation
for now, but President Nixon had started to view him
as a liability. So one day in late nineteen seventy one,
Nixon decided he'd had enough. He was finally going to
fire J. Edgar Hoover. Here's Professor Daniel Chard.
Speaker 2 (41:22):
He arranged his whole special breakfast with Hoover where he
was going to try to break the news.
Speaker 1 (41:28):
Hmm, you smell that. That's just the scent of waffles
and bacon and me finally getting rid of your ass.
Nixon didn't actually tell Hoover he was fired. He offered
him the opportunity to retire with dignity and let a
new FBI director make a fresh start. But even at
the age of seventy six, coming off the worst scandal
(41:48):
of his career, Hoover called Nixon's bluff.
Speaker 2 (41:52):
And Hoover was just too slick. Hoover said, I would
be happy to go into retirement if you would put
in that you would like me to do that, And
Nixon realizes he's not going to do that. He doesn't
want to put that in writing because Hoover is so popular,
especially among the conservative base.
Speaker 1 (42:11):
When the breakfast ended, Hoover was still the director of
the FBI. Nixon had even agreed to increase the bureau's
personnel budget. Even now fighting for his job, as his
men flailed around desperately interrogating every hippie in the greater
Philadelphia area. Hoover was a force to be reckoned with.
And even though his g mens blanket surveillance tactics had
(42:34):
allowed most of the culprits to slip right through their
fingers undetected, they still had some tricks up their sleeves.
Speaker 9 (42:41):
And then I hear this guy yelled.
Speaker 1 (42:44):
Freeze coming up on snappho.
Speaker 3 (42:49):
They came to the doors, guns drawn and put us
up against the wall.
Speaker 1 (42:54):
The FBI arrested twenty persons in Camden.
Speaker 14 (42:56):
New Jersey, early today and charged them with trying to
steal draftra and the federal building there.
Speaker 9 (43:02):
Forty seven years would have been the maximum.
Speaker 6 (43:05):
There was this feeling that nothing actually would happen in
terms of Hoover having to face the music. It felt
like the end at that time, but it wasn't the end.
Speaker 1 (43:23):
Snafoo is a production of iHeartRadio, Film Nation Entertainment, and
Pacific Electric Picture Company in association with Gilded Audio. This
season of Snafoo is based on the book of the Burglary,
The Discovery of j Edgar Hoover's Secret FBI, written by
Betty Metzger. It's executive produced by me Ed Helms, Milan Papelka,
Mike Valbo, Whitney Donaldson, Andy Chug, Dylan Fagan, and Betty Metzger.
(43:47):
Our lead producers are Sarah Joyner and Alyssa Martino. Producer
is Stephen Wood. This episode was written by Albert Chen,
Sarah Joyner, and Stephen Wood, with additional writing and story
editing from Alissa Martino and Ed Helms. Tory Smith is
our associate producer. Nevin Calla Poly is our production assistant
Facts checking by Charles Richter. Our creative executive is Brett Harris.
(44:09):
Sensitivity consult from Oloa Kemi Ala de Sui, Editing, sound
design and original music by Ben Chugg, Engineering and technical
direction by Nick Dooley. Additional editing from Kelsey Albright, Olivia
Canny and Jimma Castelli Foley theme music by Dan Rosatto.
Special thanks to Alison Cohen, Daniel Welsh and Ben Riizak.
Additional thanks to director Joanna Hamilton for letting us use
(44:32):
some of the original interviews from her incredible documentary nineteen
seventy one. Finally, our deepest gratitude to the courageous Citizens
Commission to Investigate the FBI, Bill Davidon, Ralph Daniel, Judy
fine Gold, Keith Forsyth, Bonnie Rains, John Rains, Sarah Schumer
and Bob Williamson,
Host
Ed Helms
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