1. Summer of Rage

show disturbing. I want to take you back to the summer of twenty twenty. The pandemic is here and a lot is still really unknown. For months, millions of Americans have been out of work, locked up in their homes, and left deeply uncertain about the future. The nation is a tinder box of anger. Look. Racial justice activists have come out in force in cities nationwide to protest against police brutality, resulting in an unprecedented explosion of activism around

the broader Black Lives Matter movement. Right wing activists hit the streets too as counter protesters, groups ranging from pro police demonstrators to violent street thugs like the Proud Boys, and militia groups like the oathkeepers, it will turn to war. Some of the encounters turned violent. In turn, anti fascist activists, often dressed in black and referred to as antifa, begin

meeting right wing violence with force of their own. The clashes result in the kind of political violence Americans haven't seen in decades. The city became a war zone. Large groups torch police cruisers as officers fired back with rubber bullings. Violence involving the Proud Boys and leftist Antifa in Portland, Oregon. In recent weeks, President has been calling for law and order,

but many say he's fueling the flames. Lots of people on the right, from President Donald Trump in the Oval Office to Tucker Carlson on Fox News, they start calling out Antifa, painting them as militarized extremists who want nothing more than to kill cops and burn America to the ground. Black lives matter, Antifa is going to grow like ices dated the Middle Ease. Violent young men with guns will be in charge. You will not want to live here

when that happens. According to President Trump, anti fascist activists aren't simply there to stop violent right wing extremists and fascists. No, these antifa guys they're the real threat. Former Defense Secretary Mark Asper says that Trump suggested that the US military shoot Black Lives Matter protesters outside of the White House. A mounted police have been coming down the street using lash bangs in front of them to clear what has

been an entirely peaceful protest. Note nine percent, but one hundred percent. People can protests. If you remember this public debate gets pretty ridiculous. Soup and they throw the cans of soup. That's better than a brick, because you can't throw a brick it's too heavy. But a can of soup, you can really put some power into that. Right, people on the left are practically screaming, this is all a distraction, a distraction from the very real issues of police brutality

against black people. And TIEF is an idea, not an organization, you got it. Not polition, That's what it is. To the FBI is FBI direct. All the while, demonstrators are marching and COVID is raging, the economy is falling apart, people are getting shot, and nobody knows what's going to happen next. Plus there's this boogeyman hiding behind every corner. He's playing into Antifa being the boogeyman being behind these protests. You know, Fox News is still running riot porn, acting

like the riots are still happening today. Fantiva is just sort of this abstract boogeyman word that we hear. On the other side, you can clearly see it is what happens. All I can tell you is we're not the evil boogeyman people think we are. What are you people that care about our country? But what if I were to tell you there is an Antifa boogeyman? He was real. He drove a silver hearse and the back of that hearse was filled with guns, lots and lots of guns.

In the summer of twenty twenty, he rode into town. I don't give a fuck about the cops, and I don't care about the police. I do not agree nor accept fascism. But understand this, if you come to me fucked up, I'm gonna fuck you up. Stupid games, when stupid prizes. I'm Trevor Aaronson from Western Sound and iHeart podcasts. This is alphabet boys, So what or who is an

alphabet boy. Alphabet boys are federal agents or informants working for the Alphabet agencies FBI, CIA, d EA, ATF These are our national law enforcement and intelligence agencies that run around the country and the world, fighting crime and collecting intelligence.

These agencies aren't interested in small cases either. We're talking about really, really big cases, some of the biggest attacks against the United States, criminal organizations, terrorists, etc. For about as long as I've been a journalist, I've covered the way that these alphabet agencies use undercover agents and informants to orchestrate so called sting operations, where an undercover agent pretends to be a criminal, a terrorist, a drug dealer,

an arms trader, a corrupt lobbyist, a money launder, and on and on. We've largely come to accept undercover stings as legitimate and necessary. But it wasn't so long ago that many Americans found these techniques outrageous for the way they appear to create crimes and entrap people in criminal plots made possible only by aggressive undercover federal agents. Each season of Alphabet Boys, we'll take you inside one of these investigations as the FBI. Sometimes you get it grabbed

the little guy to go after the biggest. You'll hear undercover recordings that were kept secret until now. This is reference case number four one five Season Charlie, New York three zero zero eight five one. Okay, so you do personal security all over the world. You're connected to all these different people. You'll meet supposed terrorists, arms dealers, and drug runners. And you had somebody call you and say, can you get grenades and guns for this guy in Columbia?

A lot of ammunitions forty seven And you'll discover that while many of these cases have plenty of danger and intrigue, I just drove for eight hours and then I just stuffed my gun in the face of a federal agent. They also introduce so much absurdity. I got knocked off of Golding about a month ago, and my hip is shattered. My maipulation is a Jedi mindshield that it's hard not to wonder. I will be polite and professional, our America's top cops catching real criminals, but I have a plan

to kill everybody in the fucking room. I need to be or are they creating them? You want to show? This is season one Trojan Hearst, Episode one, Summer of Rage. The protests in Denver continuous. Hundreds of protesters have gathered in front of the state capital tonight. Of all the racial justice demonstrations around the country in the summer of twenty twenty, Denver, Colorado saw some of the biggest, most intense protests we've been watching as fences are smashed, torn down,

protesters starting fires, and building umbrella barricades. This is a live look at downtown Denver where we have seen this clash happening now for about the thousands demonstrate outside the Colorado State Capital, chanting a phrase synonymous with young black men dying at the hands of police officers. Some of the Denver protests become violent and destructive. The police fire pepper spray and rubber bullets into the crowds, injuring dozens,

but the protesters just keep coming out undaunted. Day ten of protests across Denver, nearly a week after police use tear gas and pepper balls to disperse protesters outside, and then one night, a new guy shows up at the protests. He's a white guy wearing military fatigues with patches and stripes that he claims to have earned fighting the Islamic State or ISIS in a rock and Syria. He has a cigar dangling from his lips. And the car he

drives is unmistakable. It's a silver hearse with a sticker on the back window reading Peshmerga, the Kurdish military force, and inside his hearts with a lack a lot of guns, you know, a R fifteens and all other kind of shit. This is zep Hal. He was a regular at the Denver protests. Yeah, it was just this badass dude, you know, talking about he worked in the foreign military. He was

for the Black Lives Matter movement. He just seemed like some authoritary figure, you know, this powerful figure that was there. He was very convincing, but he did explain, you know, he was part of like a bad biker gangs. You know, he had committed a ton of violence, you know, but you know he was for this BLM movement. This dude was like a bad motherfucker. This bad motherfucker also introduces himself to another Denver organizer, Trey Quinn. He's like, I've

done this and that. I was in the PKK and the French Foreign Legion and so on, and YadA, YadA, YadA. We ran night protests every night, and so we see him a bunch and he approaches us every single time from that point on, he walked up with a body cam on me. And here's another regular at the Denver protests, Bright Shelby. I didn't think nothing about the body cam in hindsight, just because I just I don't know. There

were just a lot of things going on. I guess he remembers the Hearst dude walking around with a GoPro camera stropped to his chest. It was strange. I guess he de escalated any type of suspicion because he started like flashing his prison badge. So yeah, you know what I mean, Like, Okay, he's not this guy in affair you walking around with a prison badge. Yeah. Around the time this mysterious character starts showing up, the protests in

Denver are stagnating. They're becoming this cat and mouse game between demonstrators and cops. People coming out in mostly peaceful ways, cops coming out with riot gear and overwhelming force. People like zeb Tray and Bryce. They're getting frustrated. Something more needs to happen, something new, and then something new does happen. I was like, Hey, this guy, you know, he wants to train people how to you know, defend themselves and use the weapons and he showed me how to do

it as well. The guy with real military experience is here. He's a commanding presence, he's got a hearse full of guns. He's going to take things to the next level. That's after the break. We live in a very divided country right now, and that's not news. Everyone knows it. We talk about it over dinner, cable news, on social media. But this division is something that really bothers Denver racial justice activist zeb Hal. He thinks it's really a distraction.

We're not focusing on how our government is abusing all of us. They're so good at dividing us, so good at it that we can't acknowledge things will happening to other people. We can't accept anyone stepping out degree from the group think, and that enables them to continue this mass surveillance. Instead, zeb says, we sit at home watching Cops and Robbers shows with clear good guys and unambiguous bad guys, the portrait of a just and fair American

criminal justice system that has never really existed. Look at CBS, they have like fucking a million police officer shows, all these other major networks, so we know the networks cater them make them look real good. Hell, they could be listening in here, they could be in my fucking TV. The apparatus is that powerful. So yeah, Zeb, he's pretty skeptical of the US government, and as a black man,

Zeb's pretty tired of hearing about our racial divide. In his view, the US government and the country's most powerful corporations encourage the racial division we now have so that poor white people and poor black people can't form the

political alliance they naturally should. Well, I understand, you know, me and being black in this system, you know, I feel like this, Yeah, yeah, Okay, there's white privilege, but we are led to believe that it's this all powerful weapon, like white people don't have to do anything, and that is part of the thing that's used to divide us. But I dare someone to go in the middle of fucking Arkansas to a white community who lost a factory

and say, hey, you're entitled, You've got this privilege. But we're made to think that way. They're dealing with the same shit people in inner city. They are fucked up, they're own drugs. Also, they're living in poverty. But we're made to think those white people in rural areas are constantly the enemy when they're living in a hall as well, the same fucking hell as us, but we are told that that other side is fucking terrible. Zeb, whose full

name is Zebadias, wasn't always this caustic. His anger really set in a couple of years ago, in early twenty twenty, when the pandemic started. He saw how people on the an edge like him, suffered job losses, poor healthcare, mounting debts, and anxieties about eviction. At the same time, Zeb saw affluent Americans adapting to the pandemic with ease, working remotely deliveries from Amazon in their local grocery store, lush fenced in backyards to get fresh air, iPads, and new laptops

for their kids to use for remote schooling. The pandemic, in Zeb's view, laid bare the inequities in America. Some of us had everything, while others of us were a missed paycheck away from poverty. Were all in danger. We're all in danger, and that is serious. I think in the right ways. I have become more radicalized because I care more about people. Zeb was born in nineteen eighty four. His parents were in high school when his mom got pregnant with him, and then his dad skipped down, so

Zeb's childhood was tumultuous. He lived with his grandmother for a bit in California when he was a small boy, and aually moved to North Carolina when his mother married a US marine. In his twenties, Zeb had a serious girlfriend in North Carolina and she decided to move to Denver. So Zeb followed and he and his girlfriend got married. I got here shockingly, unexpectedly on four twenty and she takes me downtown Denver, and I'm seeing all these people smoking.

They're all going to get arrested. They're all gonna arrested. I gotta get out of here. I gotta get here, and I'm freaking out. Then I got pulled over by a cop in October of twenty twelve, and he asked, you got any drugs in the car, And I'm like, I've got some marijuana sart, Okay, you got any drugs in the car I've got this week? And I'm freaking out. He says, no, do you have any real drugs. We're not worried about that. I'm like, oh no, I do not. You know. It was real funny. It was real funny.

But that's how I got your You know, we had a daughter along the way. She has our other two kids as well, which is a big story on the side. But yeah, that's how I got here. I got here. Zeb glosses over this part a bit. He and his now ex wife, Bridget, had a dog, as Zeb mentioned, but they were living in poverty and didn't want to subject their daughter to such a difficult life. So Zeb's mother and stepfather in North Carolina, who were well off

by comparison, agreed to take care of the girl. Zeb travels back regularly to visit and tries to be there for big moments birthdays, first days of school, major holidays. It was around twenty fifteen when his daughter was born. That's when Zeb began to feel America had become fundamentally unfair, that rich people were getting richer, and that no matter how hard he worked, he was getting poorer. He couldn't

even support his daughter. The American system seemed broken. Zeb wasn't the first person to feel disillusioned with the American promise, but he and others were seeing how body camera and cell phone footage had created a near constant stream of news stories about Black people dying at the hands of police officers nationwide. Eric Gardner, Michael Brown, to mere Rice,

Freddy Gray, Brianna Taylor. The list goes on. In Colorado, in twenty nineteen, there was Elijah McClain, a twenty three year old who died after being arrested by a war police. Police say Elijah McClain was wearing a ski mask, acting agitated and ignored officers commands. Elijah was, by all accounts, an introverted, sensitive, twenty three year old. He worked as a massage therapist and taught himself to play guitar and violin. Elijah would often play music at animal shelters to help

calm the stray cats and dogs. Elijah also suffered from anemia, and so we'd wear an open faced ski mask even during the summer in Colorado in order to stay warm. On the evening of August twenty four, twenty nineteen, Elijah walked from his apartment to a convenience store in Aurora suburb just outside Denver. A resident there called nine one

one and reported a man wearing a ski mask. The mask, Oh, man, Elijah looks sketchy, the nine one one caller said, then added he might be a good person or a bad person. Three cops responding to this call stopped Elijah as he was walking back to his apartment. The cops claimed Elijah resisted arrest and reached for one of the officers guns. It's hard to know what's true. The video of the

initial encounter is shaky and unclear. The body camera of another police officer recorded from the point that Elijah was already on the ground. We started their visiting. That's one of the officers claiming that Elijah reached for a gun. As you can hear, Elijah pinned down to the ground, pleading to be let go. The officers speculated that Elijah was on drugs, but Elijah kept telling them that he wasn't on drugs and that he wasn't trying to resist.

I can't breathe, I have my ID right here. That's what Elijah tells the officers. At the time, Elijah was handcuffed behind his back and one of the officers was applying a chokeold to his neck. Page of different, completely, I'm just different, Elijah told the officers as a way to explain why they might have thought his behavior was odd, but also to assure them that he wasn't violent, he wasn't trying to resist. He kept saying that to the cops.

Paramedics then arrived on the scene and injected Elijah with five hundred milligrams of ketamine as a sedative. That dosage would have been excessive for a two hundred pound man. Elijah was just one hundred and forty pounds. His pull stopped and he was taken to the hospital. Three days later, Elijah was pronounced brain dead and taken off life support. Elijah's death sparked outrage in Denver. People poured into the streets to protest. One of the first events I went

to was shortly after the murder of Elijah mclin. Zeb Angered about Elijah's senseless killing was among them. He'd never been politically active before. You know. I went there and saw his mother and a bunch of other people, and everyone was hurt. You know, we knew it was wrong. In February twenty twenty, after the demonstrations for Elijah mclin began to fizzle out, public officials announced they would investigate

the police response. It was something, sure, but there wasn't a lot of faith that the police officers and paramedics responsible for Elijah's death would be held accountable. Then three months later, on May twenty fifth, twenty twenty, a white police officer in Minneapolis named Derek Schouven arrest a black man named George Floyd on suspicion that he had used

a counterfeit twenty dollar bill. Chauvin restrains Floyd on the concrete street during the arrest, and he places his knee directly on Floyd's neck for approximately nine minutes, and he murders George Floyd. Good even to everyone. We're coming on the air with the latest on the wave of protests unrest taking place at this hour across the country, outrage at the death of George Floyd and African American man in Denver. Floyd's death is like gasoline thrown on the

warm embers of anger over Elijah McClain. Thousands of people protest in the streets, animated by both men's untimely death at the hands of police officers, and the Denver area police response to the demonstrations was brutal. In June, dozens of people gather in Aurora's public Square for Elijah McClain. They call it the Violin vigil as many of the

demonstrators play violins in Elijah's honor. The police, dressed in riot gear, storm into the demonstration and disperse the crowd with violent shoves in full volume streams of pepper spring. During other demonstrations, police in the Denver area fire pepper balls and rubber bullets into the crowds, injuring dozens. It's like, fucking wow, I'm out there with my camera, he goes, I'd never taken photos, you know before, I just picked up the hobby at the time. Zeb Hal had purchased

a camera to document the protest. It was crazy, you know, I'm just you know, taking pictures that I'm seeing his fire in a civic center park and then it's kind of like a saving private Ryan moment. Zeb isn't quite sure what happened next. Did a rubber bullet hit him in the head? Where did he pass out after being overwhelmed with pepper spray and then smack his head on

the concrete. I'm like, you're just like kind of flozzed out of people picked me up off the ground and they brought me, you know, took me away, put some I think it was milk in my eyes and shit and kind of brought me back to But I was having issues after that. My head was hurting so bad and I wasn't able to sleep well. I was just like sporadic, like emotional, like losing my mind. You know. I had to get I think it was a cat skin.

You know. They almost told me to like stop driving at one point, they were really concerned memory was off a little bit, you know, to some degree. Yeah, it was pretty pretty rough. From that point on, Zeb admits he's done in his right mind. He's taking a hard hit to the head, and he feels traumatized by the police response of the protests, but he doesn't want to quit. It feels like they're on the edge of something big. Maybe the system could be reformed if enough people come

out and speak up. He's too far in, Zeb can't stop now. And this is about the time that a man arrives in Denver driving up to a protest in a silver hearse filled with guns. One of the primary organizers of the Denver racial justice protests is Trey Quinn, a tall black man who wears a beard and large frame glasses. Trey identifies as a black nationalist through his activism he's trying to promote organizations and causes that invest

directly in black communities in Colorado. What we were asking for is the same type of investment in the community that would give us the same type of ownership in a city that other communities have. You know, people can look at the skyline and they see all these buildings, and none of those buildings provide any sort of wealth to black culture, but they provide wealth to these other cultures because they have investments in that. And we wanted to let people know this is what is really needed

for us to get out of our situation. Since you want to help us so much, this is actually what we need, and so that was my message. Trade dislikes that the protests in Denver and others around the country are being described as Black Lives Matter protests. Black Lives Matter is largely a decentralized movement, and the term became a catch all phrase for news media worldwide. Any racial justice protest in America was described as a Black Lives

Matter or BLM demonstration. But at the same time, a number of groups begin raising money under BLM, and in Trade's view, very little of this money is being invested in black communities. As Tracy's it, it's all a scam. They extract wealth from us via the donations that we get from these well meaning white liberals who want to give us money, who want to stay out of it,

but want to help out. They see that as a cash cow, and so they became a barrier over top of us, a big fat bubble layer, to catch all of that money before it reached us, so that they could decide who to give it to, which obviously wasn't us. Besides all that, Trey has some real practical things to sort out on the ground. The police have established a reputation in and around Denver for responding to demonstrators with force, like they did on June twenty, twenty twenty during the

violin vigil for Elijah McClain. It's now mid July and Trey has gathered a bunch of demonstrators to teach them how to move together in a formation in order to escape safely from a charging line of police officers dressed in riot gear. The cops come in lines like stormtroopers, and so what they try to do is they'll pick a person off by separating the group with their line.

And so I started teaching these people how to create you know, like the Spartan Faylenx rank, essentially teaching them how to cress it moon and how to like open up in like a wide oval so that they can move their way out of a situation. And so if everyone links arms and everyone creates a crescent moon, it prevents the cops from wanting to go into the group and move people out because now they see that they

are in danger. As Trey is describing how to employ this defensive tactic during a demonstration, a couple of other activists show up with this new guy. He'd driven up in a silver hearse he's a white guy in military fatigues, and so they're like, hey, this guy's really really dope. He's legit, he knows his shit. You should let him sit in and he could probably help you out. And so he comes in and essentially he's really pushy, trying to like give directions and trying to like, you know,

like put himself at the forefront to trade. This guy's a brash, no it all who's ready to take charge. And he looks like a biker and Trey he doesn't trust bikers, and I usually approach dudes who look bikers in these groups because I just need to know one, are you armed, so that I can keep an eye on you until I know that you're quote unquote one of us or whatever you know the term could be. But this biker guy, he's got the goods. He's like,

I got guys all around here videotaping. They'll give us a call as soon as the cops are moving around the corner, which they did. They let us know by providing information about where the police were, information that turned out to be accurate. This guy quickly establishes credibility among the demonstrators. They start to trust him, and as far as Trey remembers, this is also around the time that Zeb Hall comes on the scene. Zeb was known for

his impassioned and fiery speeches during demonstrations. At one of the demonstrations, Zeb meets the guy driving the silver hearse, the mysterious man who appears to be taking charge of the demonstrators. He's leading protests, organizing people, and drawing up plans. Zeb is in awe of him. He seems like a guy who can make stuff happen. He has military training. He speaks with a raspy voice of dominance, his shirt fits tight or and his large biceps. He's like, he

has testosterone dripping from his pores. And he has guns, a lot of guns. He was there and I'm like, Yo, this dude has a ship ton of guns in his car. So my thing is he worked for foreign military. He said the United States government knew it, So maybe this guy's a lot to have guns. At that time, Zeb is enthralled with this mysterious guy. He's experienced on the battlefield and he has expertise with weapons. Zeb exchanged his phone numbers with him and they agree to stay in touch. Yeah,

see you the next protests a year round. I'll contact you. You know, I'll text you if I find out if this is going on with this thing. Zeb's new friend doesn't waste any time contacting him. He tells Zeb that the protests are reaching a tipping point and that violence is coming. It's inevitable. The way I look at is like shit has to happen. The has to happen. Shit has to happen. He says to Zeb, how extreme do

you expected? Would you want it to go? This guy he's about to take the racial justice protest in Denver a violent step forward. It's time to shoot the rich, he tells zeb. It's time to take down buildings, It's time to burn down the whole system. I don't give a fuck about going to prison. I don't give a fuck about getting killed, because you believe me. I've fought Isis or Nash, I've fought Al Kayeeda, I've fought Hubble Shoppy.

I've fought in Iraq and I've fought in Syria. I've trained real emptief of freedom fighters in both those regions. And I am certainly not fucking scared of you. Who is this man that's in the next episode? This is Trojan Hearst Season one of Alphabet Boys. Alphabet Boys is a production of Western Sound and iHeart Podcasts. The show is reported, written and hosted by me Trevor Aaronson. For more information about this series or to drop us a tip, head to our website Alphabet Boys dot xyz. You can

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