Bonus: Tribal Thumb

This murder began a period of activity that would end roughly eighteen months later with Earl Satcher's death during a shootout on a San Francisco street. Earl Satcher was born in nineteen forty two. He apparently lived mostly in Long Beach, California, where he began to accumulate a criminal record for auto theft and armed robbery beginning when he was eighteen. By the mid nineteen sixties, he'd become active in the Long Beach Black Panthers and eventually rose to the rank of captain.

In nineteen sixty eight, Satcher was arrested for assaulting his sister's boyfriend with a pistol. He was found guilty of illegally possessing a firearm and spent three months in the county jail before being released in January of sixty nine. By October, according to an FBI letter, he was being watched by law enforcement. Also in sixty nine, Sacher met and joined forces with a white man named Benny Sargus. Sargus, who was in his forties, was the physical opposite of

the powerful, imposing Satcher. Sargus was short and stocky, had greasy hair and a scraggly beard and mustache. He claimed to have been born into the mafia. The men hit it off. They both liked guns, neither had qualms with using violence. Satcher was back in prison in nineteen seventy for parole violations. During this stint, he asserted himself as a black militant leader within a prison group called the Alternative Group. He also corresponded with staff members of a

radical magazine called Vocations for Social Change. On March fifth, nineteen seventy one, the Los Angeles Free Press published a number of letters from inmates at San Quentin, including two from Earl Satcher. Before and after a confrontation with a white supremacist inmate that had been set up by guards

with the apparent intention of killing Sacher. Today, the fourteenth of September, and tomorrow the fifteenth, I will be released into the exercise tier with an inmate who just three days ago was hurling human feces and urine at me and other brothers here on max Row. I am to proceed to the tier with this said prisoner, even though I'm with the knowledge that officials have armed the said inmate in an effort to perpetrate my death. I have faith in my ability to defend myself, and I shall

do so fully. Four days later, he wrote another letter, a summation of what happened on the exercise tier. At approximately eight fifteen, Officer Horton, the day Officer on max Row, approached my cell, unlocked it and ordered me to prepare to come onto the tier to work as a porter with inmate A, a racist Neo American Nazi. In an attempt to integrate max Row, Officer Horton opened both cell doors, and after a brief wait, Inmate A left his cell.

Inmate A then proceeded up the tier towards me at a distance of about three feet, he stopped and pulled from his pocket a makeshift knife. At this display, I settled into a Kung fu defensive stance and waited for the said inmate to launch his attack. Inmate A was apparently thrown off by this posture and tried to bait Sacher with a shower of dehumanizing names common to the racist mentality. Sacher stayed where he was, as in his telling eight to ten officials watch from behind a locked gate.

According to Sacher's letter, this standoff lasted for about ten minutes before officials realized that inmate A had lost his enthusiasm for the fight and moved in.

be the foundation leading to a socio political victory over oppression. Clearly, because governments and societies are made up of people, people are made up of biological and social character structures, change the character structure of people, and people will in turn change the structure of societies and governments. A nineteen seventy two parole report on Satcher mentions finding a full garden of nine millimeters rounds and another garden with eight missing

shells in Sacher's car. It states that the holster and revolutionary literature were found in his apartment. According to the Berkeley barb despite the parole violations involving firearms, the FBI asked the San Bernardino Sheriff's office not to use the evidence to revoke Sacher's parole. They said they were investigating Satcher and planned to charge him, but he was not arrested or charged. The bar points to this as an initial sign that he may have been working with the

FBI in some capacity. Either that or he could be manipulated to the point where he might as well be working for the FBI. In late nineteen seventy three, Satcher and Sargeist moved Tribal thumbed north to the Bay Area. There were rumors about Satcher's activities during nineteen seventy three, that he was involved in running guns from Canada to the US, that he formed links to Vince Ramos group

based in Palo Alto. In these early days up north, Tribal Thumb acquired guns and focused on revolutionary rhetoric and training for guerrilla warfare. One of the only contemporaneous insider accounts of life in Tribal Thumb comes from a woman named Hetty Sarney, the daughter of Romanian survivors of the Holocaust. Her story came to light after she was arrested for her part in a disastrous nineteen seventy three bank robbery.

She lived alone on Channing Street in Berkeley. The street was, in her words, like a self contained community, like a commune in many ways. She attended Grove Street College, a radical school attended by, among others, future SLA members Joe Ramiro and Patricia Missmoon Sultizic. Sarny came to know Saltiesk along with Camilla Hall, another soon to be SLA member, so she was already a member of one part of the radical community. She met Earl Satcher at a bar

on October nineteenth, nineteen seventy three. Satcher invited her to visit the Tribal Thumb home, which was a camper parked in the driveway of a house they hoped to eventually buy. Sarny was painting her apartment at the time, and Sacher offered to help. While they worked, Sacher talked about the eccentric doctor and psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich more on him later. By October twenty third, just four days after Sacher met Hetty Sarney, Tribal Thumb members had moved into her apartment

and she was essentially a prisoner. They worked on indoctrinating her into their revolutionary ideology. Sarny had grown up in communists Romania, though, and was not inclined towards the political side of revolutionary groups. Her ambition was to go to medical school and open medical clinic in Mexico and Guatemala.

She became increasingly concerned the next day. According to her deposition given for an appeal to her bank robbery conviction, she stated then he said that they were going to rob a bank in order to buy a house for their commune.

Then they thought she should write a suicide note, which she refused to do.

November ninth, we robbed the Bank of America. The Tribal Thumb considered themselves a well drilled guerrilla unit. The bank robbery should have put an end to that. It was a fiasco. The robbery took place at the Bank of America in Berkeley, near the University of California campus. Several members of Tribal Thumb entered the bank armed. Sarny was with them unarmed. Her job was to get behind the bank counter and fill bags with cash. Satra was driving

a getaway van. The robbers emerged from the bank with sixteen thousand dollars worth of bills stuffed into bags, only to find that the van was not there. They dispersed, fleeing the scene and eventually finding the van blocks away from the bank.

the murder of Oakland Schools Superintendent Marcus Foster. That moment, when Earl Satcher, Hetty Sarney, and four others were in jail in the wake of their failed bank robbery, became very important in Tribal Thumb's trajectory because Benny Sargus contacted the United Prisoners Union or UPU, the organization run by Popeye Jackson, to see about getting help to fund Sacher's defense. The funding didn't come through, but this was the critical

beginning of Tribal Thumb's relationship with the UPU. Sacher's defense didn't require funding because of what may have been ludicrous in competence by the FBI or further indication of Sacher being an FBI asset. To put it succinctly, the FBI lost most of the evidence before trial, including the bank, while the other five were sentenced to some jail time. Satcher, the leader, walked free soon after. In nineteen seventy four, Tribal Thumb members began to attend UPU meetings, events and

Saturday study sessions. Among those attending were Benny Sargus and a small time burglar and drug offender named Richard London who went by Ricardo London. Tribal Thumb enjoyed good relations with UPU during the People in Need.

and things became heated. After that, Tribal Thumb no longer associated with UPO. Sarah Jane Moore left it around the same time and began associating to an unknown degree with Tribal Thumb. Even in the context of radical and revolutionary groups, Tribal Thumb had some strange beliefs and tenets. First among them was their adherence to the teachings of Austrian doctor and psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich. SATR focused primarily on Reich's ideas around orgone energy. Orgone was a word coined by Reich

that was a combination of organism and orgasm. He theorized that orgone was an omnipresent and essential substance, and that a lack of organ in the body could cause problems ranging from neuroses to cancer. Sex was apparently the remedy for this, and was encouraged and at times forced among Tribal Thumb members. Monogamy was bourgeois. Tribal Thumb owned a property called the Honeydew Ranch north of San Francisco in Mendocino County, where they raised Arabian horses. Here, the activities

veered between the colt like and revolutionary. Like many radical groups, Tribal Thumb performed a type of brutal group therapy that could include browbeating, interrogation, isolation, sleep, deprivation, violence, and other techniques often used by colts to instill competence in revolutionary action. A Tribal Thumb member named Walter Hunsacker trained the group in the use of firearms and allegedly arranged for the purchase of guns as well. He taught techniques to make

guns untraceable. Huntsacker pushed the group towards action. He talked about revolutionary subjects, and in January of nineteen seventy five, was present when Benny Sargis told Ricardo London that Popeye Jackson was a snitch and that they had to lean

on him. But Huntsacker was not a true believer. He was an infiltrator working for the FBI, a provocateur, and there are questions about whether he was the driving force behind violent actions that would have fallen under the aims of the FBI's co intel pro initiative, actions such as the murder of Popeye Jackson. Sacher's strange political and philosophical teachings alienated some followers, and Tribal Thumb evolved into a

small group dedicated to Sacher. The consequences for leaving the group or not adhering to Sacher's beliefs were in Benny Sargus's weird mafia speak to take their air. Here's an example of Satri's bizarre activities. He brought several Tribal Thumb members to an isolated house in Pacific Grove, a town on the Monterey Peninsula south of San Francisco. The house was owned by a single woman, and SATR thought it could serve as a headquarters. Sacher apparently wanted to show

her how completely he controlled his followers. To do this, he had a child dive off a table toward a stone floor, making no attempt to break his own fall. Sacher grabbed him just before he landed. There's no account of the woman's reaction, but the group left when Sacher saw just how many people regularly visited the house. It

didn't have the privacy that he'd anticipated. We cover the Popeye Jackson assassination in the main podcast, so I won't go into it again here other than to mention that the Berkeley barb found plenty of reason to believe that the FBI was at best indifferent to Popeye's murder. They pointed to the fact that the only witness to the crime described two people involved in the murder, but the investigation essentially stopped with the arrest of a single person,

Ricardo London. Allegedly, thirty eight caliber bullets were found at the assassination scene, in addition to the bullets from the nine millimeter handgun used by Ricardo London. This was never explained, and despite his dominant control over Tribal Thumb, Sacher was only questioned once in association with Popeye's murder. The FBI had not only placed Walter Huntsacker in Tribal Thumb, but

had another informant, Gary Johnson, in the group. Both were in position to know about the plans to assassinate Popeye, but they didn't try to stop it. Ricardo London gave Huntsacker the nine millimeter pistol he used, minus the barrel on July second, nineteen seventy five, less than a month after the June seventh assassination. San Francisco police detective Frank

Falzan had found the gun's barrel on June eighth. Clearly, the evidence that Huntsacker possessed the barrelless gun and his knowledge from inside Tribal Thumb, could have led to an early resolution of the investigation, but Falzon did not even get that part of the gun until March of seventy six, nine months later. Finally, Popeye's murder was in keeping with the methods of co intel Pro, which had been officially ended in nineteen seventy one, but whose tactics continued on

informally provoking. The murder of one revolutionary figure by a separate revolutionary group was exactly the type of operation that would have fallen under.

Conversation was forbidden, no music was played, the walls were bare. The idea was that the food was the sole focus of diners. Then Tribal Thumb arrived. According to the owner at the time, he was promised lots of sex from the women members of Tribal Thumb if he let the

group move in. He would later assert in Small Claims Court that this abundant sex was not provided, but Tribal Thumb had already moved in, changing the name of the restaurant and eventually their group to the Well Springs Communion,

they made the building their headquarters. Among other changes, the restaurant began to hold jazz concerts, including saxophone duets with Satcher, who is considered a very accomplished saxophonist, and Sunny Stitt, considered one of the great jazz saxophonists of his generation. A restaurant review in nineteen seventy nine stead of Well

Springs Communion. It regards the restaurant as a service to the community wholesome fare at bedrock cost, but it is also a source of income for the group, whose primary effort is to provide alternative patterns of work and life for its members. The review is not great, emphasizing that the food, usually curried, was generally cold. It concludes, given

hot food, I'm sure more would attend. It's not entirely clear when Tribal Thumb began calling themselves the Well Springs Communion, but I'll continue to refer to the group as Tribal Thumb to keep things from getting confusing. The second move they made was to infiltrate what was called the People's Food System. This was a loose network of Bay Area food co ops, households, and communes that banded together to

provide an alternative to the large grocery store chains. They would pool money to purchase large amounts of organic foods and then meet to divvy.

members worked at the Veritable Vegetable. Benny Sargis, second only to Sacher in the Tribal Thumb hierarchy, and a former San quentin inmate known as Red, who may or may not have been a member of the Aryan Brotherhood. It was Tribal Thumb's association with the Veritable Vegetable that would eventually lead.

the communally purchased food. It would also be a place where they could employ associates, especially ex cons who might have trouble securing employment elsewhere, and it would supply a stream of money for a group that was poor and were incompetent bank robbers. In the spring of nineteen seventy seven, suspicions arose that Sargus and Red were diverting goods from the Veritable Vegetable to the Well.

the investigation. Five days later, on April twenty sixth, a special representative body met at the People's Food System warehouse one fifty five Barnevelt Street in San Francisco. The meeting was to determine whether, in the wake of their refusal to cooperate with the Benny Sargents investigation, the Veritable Vegetable would be expelled from the People's Food System. Earl Sacher arrived uninvited with two leashed Dobermans. He wasn't allowed into

the meeting, but waited downstairs instead. Upstairs, the Veritable Vegetable contingent tried to disrupt the proceedings, refusing to recognize the chair and generally making a formal meeting impossible. Eventually, a break was called to give the Veritable Vegetable group a chance to caucus and figure out their next steps.

continued to fire. Shots came back at them from unknown shooters, and there was briefly chaos. A witness named Frank Vlahovich said that there were a couple of initial shots and then they took a break, then another barrage. They were just out to waste each other when the shooting stopped. Tate was badly but not fatally injured. Sacher was dead. His body was found between two cars. His twenty two

lay nearby, along with six spent shells. The unidentified partner had fled with the shootout over A new kind of chaos ensued. Benny Sargis attacked a system employee. Other Tribal Thumb member ran upstairs to the meeting room waving a gun in each hand. The outnumbered, Veritable Vegetable and Tribal Thumb contingent were forced out of the building, and that essentially was the end of the night and the beginning

of the end for the people's food system. In the wake of the shootout, workers at Mob Revolutions issued a statement that said, in part that Sacher and his people had been known in the past to use violence and intimidation against innocent people for personal and political gain. The Black Guerrilla Family, who had earlier been asked to weigh in on the murder of Popeye Jackson, also issued a statement co signed by the Black Liberation Army, another underground

prison group. It began its analysis by stating that no organization could use the threat of violence to force other organizations to reject group decisions. It went on Earl Satcher did, in fact violate these principles by threatening Willie Tait and others a week before the fatal incident. Tribal Thumb did in fact arrive at the meeting armed and with the intention of a physical assault. It noted that Tribal Thumb had threatened the lives of the people had identified as

being responsible for Sature's death. It then said, if you think the co intel pro era has ended, look around you. It concluded any attempted acts of revenge on the part of Tribal Thumb for Sacher's death will be an unprincipled, unpolitical act which will not be tolerated by the movement period. And then the movement, in his attempt to unite around a common strategy, is watching Tribal Thumb and his organizational affiliates.

Do you bury your vengeance and adhere to and respect the principles of democratic centralism, or do you aid the counterinsurgency machinery by unleashing forces which you cannot control. Willie Tait recovered, but the People's Food System didn't. After the shootout, law enforcement cracked down on the system. They hassled workers and cited system members for health code violations. In just a few months, Mob Revolutions was shuddered, the system diminished significantly. Tribal Thumb two.

In October nineteen seventy nine, while Baker was being held in the King County Jail in Seattle in connection with the custom agent killing, Tribal Thumb provided support for yet another escape. This was a bloody affair involving seven escapees and no fewer than four separate shootouts. One escapee was killed and three escapees and.

the murder of a former member named Roseanne Goston. Goston and another woman had recently left the Honeydew Ranch commune, and on June second, nineteen eighty had returned to collect property that they considered theirs. Two women were sent to the ranch to stop them. These events took place decades ago, and the two women involved have established lives separate from these actions. Because of this, I won't use their real names. I'll call them Tracy and Brenda.

but that turned out not to be the case. They arrested five people at the house and released one after questioning. The police described the house as a fortress. The front door had a quarter inch steel plating on the front and eye iron bars on the back. They found weapons, a printing press, Marxist literature, and a trapdoor in the basement.

month old daughter. When she was picked up, she was carrying a fake ID and a list of four armored car companies along with their pickup schedule. Both women were charged with first degree murder with special circumstances. Lying in wait, their charge would have brought the death penalty or life in prison without the possibility of parole. They were allowed

to plead the voluntary manslaughter. When the county prosecutor, a man named Barry Brown, determined that witnesses had lied or were unwilling to give testimony that evidence had been destroyed, they were each sentenced to three years in prison. In a New York Times article about the case, the Well Springs Communion seems a much different organization than in the

early days of tribal thumb. The Times article ends with the following sentence describing the commune, which drew members from a variety of groups, including the Black Gorilla Family, the Black Panthers, and the Charles Manson family. Barry Brown says there were a few who were very politically aware and were true revolutionaries, but the organization was inundated with people

whose motives were not politically directed. I asked Rick Riley, who was a former member of Tribal Thumb, to tell me what he wanted people to know about the group and the people in it.

They were intelligent, good people, they just got used. And those who of us who believed that we could make a change, we couldn't. In the end, we realized all we could do is cause anarchy, and out of anarchy gained power because we knew that it was what the elite did. Out of chaos is power. So I liked it role, I really did. He could be deadly, yes, but he could be kind to you know. He was just very charismatic man. I don't follow just anybody, you know.

I mean, he had my loyalty right from the start. I loved him as a brother, and he was a good man. He actually believed in what he was doing.