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At ten thirty pm on August twenty eighth, nineteen seventy three, radical activist Popeye Jackson was arrested by two plane clothed San Francisco police officers for possession and intent to sell heroin and possession of marijuana. The officers did not have a warrant to search the car that Popeye was driving. They would later say that Popeye not only gave them permission to search the car, but actually helped with the search. People who knew Popeye would dispute this, arguing that there
was no way he would have permitted the search. In fact, he frequently advised people to never let the police search their car unless they had a warrant, whether the search was legal or illegal. The cops discovered seven balloons containing heroin and depending on the source, either two or five joints hidden in a sneaker. Jackson was on parole after a stint for burglary and robbery convictions. This was potentially a catastrophic incident Popeye claimed the arrest was a setup
why it had been stopped in the first place. The police claimed that the previous night, the twenty seventh, they had arrested a woman named Sandy Parma for prostitution. According to the police, Parma gave them the tip that Popeye would have drugs with him. When the defense lawyers contacted Parma, however, she denied that she had done so. Then she disappeared
and never resurfaced. On September tenth, two weeks after the arrest, a twenty two year old woman named Jessica Vodquin held a press conference organized by a radical group called Fenceramos, using the alias Jessica Marie Gilman. Vodquin had worked part time for Popeye's organization, the United Prisoners Union or UPU, but Vodquin said she had actually been an informer for the San Francisco Police Department and the FBI. She had been paid to find information about Venceamos and the UPU.
She said that she had been informing on Popeye for the last nine months. She'd once borrowed his car and driven to police headquarters where it was illegally searched. She'd stolen keys, to the UPU office so that she could access documents, including the list of former prisoners involved in
the UPU and Popeye's address book. She said that she knew that Pope's arrest was a frame up, and that the police had illegally recorded conversations that Popeye had with his lawyer in a room specifically created for confidential conversations between attorneys and clients. Police told her. She said that Popeye was their number one target and that he'd been under twenty four hour surveillance. This was a bombshell. Lending credence to her story was the officer who served as
her contact with the San Francisco Police, Alexander Jason. Just six months before, the head of the San Francisco State University journalism department protested to the police department that Jason had, for eighteen months pretended to be a student reporter for a couple of different school publications in order to get information about A. Vanceramo's study group on campus. He had eventually been sniffed out by Venceramo's members and his cover
was blown. Now months later, the informant that he had inside the UPU was accusing him of breaking the law to try to convict Popeye. Popeye demanded that he'd be given a lie detector test to clear himself of the charges. The States said that red tape prevented this from happening. The police did admit that they performed the search of the car that Jessica Vadquin had brought them, and that they taped the conversations at the jail, and then Jessica
Vodquin recanted. While under protective detention by the police, she released a public statement that she had been threatened at knife point by UPU members, demanding that she lie for Popeye. This retraction was viewed suspiciously. Still, even without her testimony, there seemed to be enough questions surrounding the arrest to make a guilty verdict unlikely. Popeye testified that he did not use heroin and had strong feelings about it because his wife, pat Singer, had been addicted and his son
had been born with withdrawal symptoms. He also testified that he had recently been subject to police harassment, being stopped at least twenty five times in the two weeks leading up to his arrest. In the end, the jury deliberated for five hours and found Popeye not guilty, but this did not end his legal peril. In California, there was a panel of eight political appointees that could revoke a person's parole for any reason. For Popeye, this could mean
returning to prison indefinitely. The radical newspaper The Berkeley Barb wrote this about the situation.
This panel of flat foot lifers with jute mill manager mentalities, who've probably spent more time around the joint than most cons, will be particularly vicious with Popeye Jackson because, perhaps more than any other man in the state of California, Popeye has worked to bring their activities to public attention. So even though Popeye has committed no crime, broken no rule, they can jerk his parole and send him back for life.
A hearing on his parole revocation was set for the following April. It was with this threat hanging over him that Popeye Jackson established himself as a leader at the People in Need program and met Sarah Jane Moore. I'm Toby Ball.
And I'm Mary Catherine Garrison, and this is rip current.
Greeting to the people. This is Tanya. On April fifteenth, my comrades and I expropriated ten thousand, six hundred and sixty dollars and two cents from the Sunset branch the Hibernia Bank.
Episode eight, Popeye Jackson.
Why would the police be after Popeye Jackson? He was forty three years old and had spent nineteen of those years in the California Correctional system on a robbery charge reportedly stemming from ten missing dollars. He'd emerged from prison in nineteen seventy as the founder and president of the UPU, one of several radical groups with a presence both inside and outside prison walls. Once released, Jackson quickly became a
presence in the Bay Area. He was a member of the Western Edition Project Alliance, a youth director for Seven Steps, a drug counselor with Reality House West, and the founder of the Drug Research Program. He was also an original member of the Board of Directors of the San Francisco Council on Drug Abuse. He gave talks and community centers and schools on issues from the dangers of drugs to
what could be done about racism in Boston. While this work might seem admirable today as well as to many people at the time, at the height of the Cold War, many of these efforts were seen as influenced, if not directly the result of communism. This marked Popeye and other radical activists as in the eyes of Middle America anti American. Popeye had come to activism while a prisoner in the
California penal system. He was in prison during a particularly fertile time for radical thought, led by individuals like George Jackson and organizations like the Black Gorilla Family. Jackson, the BGF, and many other prison radicals were openly Marxist, which of course alarmed authorities. For a more in depth look at prison radicalism, listen to the Prison Radicalism Bonus episodes. They are available now for iHeart True Crime Plus listeners and will be available on all podcast apps at the end
of this season. But in short, radicals saw the penal system as an extreme microcosm of society at large, dominated by racist systems of control. This is civil rights leader Angela Davis talking about systemic racism in a nineteen seventy two interview.
In the whole history of the United States, the impact of racism had been to attempt to contain Black people, has been to attempt to stifle the desires towards liberation One of the ways in which this is accomplished is by trying to convince those people that they're completely pouloss before this huge apparatus, and that the police can just come into the community and put someone out kill them, as they have done on many many occadence in the house.
Charge them was something they didn't do railroad into physions, send them to the gas chamber. This is just one of the many ways that the system and it's not a contrive effort in the sense that it's done consciously by a few men up at the top. It's built into the system. It's built into our it built into
the nature the society. And getting back to the question of what a revolutionary is, a black revolutionary realizes that we cannot begin to combat lycism, we cannot begin to effectively destroy racism until we destroyed the whole system.
And again, prison was seen as exemplifying on a small scale, the racist system of society as a whole.
One thing that's really important to understand about California in some ways, in particular California at this time period, although it's not exclusive to California, it's how much the prison system is governing through racism. My name is Dan Berger. I'm a professor of Comparative Ethnic Studies at the University of Washington, Baffo. So the prison system uses racism as a way to keep people apart and to either introduce or foster divisions between incarcerated people. And part of that
is that prisoners outnumber guards. And so one way that prisons maintain social order is through cells. Through there's the physical infrastructure that they use. There is the presence of guards. By guards amplified that by fitting prisoners against each other, and race became the way that they did that. Race and to some extent, geography, so where in California people
were from. And so what I think radicals had to do when George Jackson did this, I think Popeye tried to do this as well, was to bridge those divides, to try to get people to work with each other, at least around some core issues against the prison system. Right, this idea that the prison system was the real enemy, whatever differences divide us.
Popeye Jackson felt as though his prison activism should benefit all prisoners. Here's Popeye talking about the prison system strategy of division on a KPFA radio documentary about the plight of gay men in California prisons.
But we don't like to isolate the gay people from any other convicts in the prison because we understand that in order to deal with distant situation, we have to work together. We have to help everybody in prison, not just gay people or not just some other guy who is not a gay person, because everybody at prison is subjected to the same subjectivity, because the men are using the gaze to play on the convicts and the contracts to play on the gaze. So it's the same way
it divide us, and we can't do that ourselves. We can't define ourselves out here. We know the man is constantly continually dividing us. If they're not divide us between gays and other straight so called great people in prison, well with they divide us in racial manner. They put white against black, black against brown, red against yellow. They constantly and continue to instigate and agitate racial attacks on people in prison.
Guards and officials used a variety of tactics to maintain an atmosphere of confrontation among different groups of people in prison, largely based on racial identity.
So they would spread rumors to for example, the white population that, oh, the black prisoners are plotting, which would not be true. They would just say this because they were trying to keep an environment that would prevent them from ever having any sort of realization that actually, we're all incarcerated and officers are above all of us.
This is Brittany Friedman, assistant professor of sociology at the University of Southern California.
But the officers kept trying to foster a unity across these boundaries to use for their own strategic ends, because we know what ends up happening to some of the groups that they united with. They were uniting with people who ended up founding the Arean Brotherhood. But we know that over time the Arian Brotherhood is no longer useful.
They do end up being locked up in Pelican Bay in other super federal facilities actually, but in the early stages in the fifties, sixties, seventies, they are very useful for the type of control strategies that I'm talking about to keep this separation. I like to think of it as old school divide and conquered.
Brittany is describing a situation where for a time, the mostly white prison guards allied themselves with the Aryan Brotherhood, a white supremacist prison gang, in an attempt to control the black prison population. Racial identity trumped the prisoner guard divide in a response to a growing number of black prisoners.
During that time period. In the sixties, you see a big influx of black people into California prisons, many of whom do self identify as either black militants or having a allegiances, affiliations, or affinities for the Black freedom struggle, which makes sense, right they're coming in from the outside.
But also in the sixties you have a very strong contingent of white incarcerated people who are also bringing with them their own societal allegiances, their own ideas from the fifties and sixties about what black freedom would be and their prejudices against it. They're also bringing in their experiences in different organized groups, so for example, bikers were very
influential in the founding of the Area and Brotherhood. They're bringing in all of these ideologies and cultural frames that are very anti black at the time, and so in the sixties, this is really creating a recipe for potential disaster. But what the Department of Corrections does, and in particular officers. White officers at the time begin to see the white incarcerated parts population, especially the self identified white supremacist population, as allies. As allies in a similar fight.
The prison radicals of the late sixties and seventies had experienced the consequences of this two pronged system of repression from both prison authorities and racist white prisoners in the violent California penal system. The parole board had the authority to send Popeye back to this environment that he knew all too well. What Popeye couldn't know was that a middle aged accountant named Sarah Jane Moore would prove a greater danger to him, but there was no sign of
this when they first met. After the break, with the threat of his parole revocation hearing hanging over his head, Popeye Jackson went to work at the People in Need program, assisting in Randolph Hurst's rushed and chaotic effort to get food to the Bay Areas poor. As Sarah Jane noticed, he assumed an authority based on his strong personality and status within the radical community. This authority showed itself in
different ways. Patty hurst fiance Stephen Weed, related a story in which Popeye was present at a meeting where PIN overseer Ludlow Kramer was criticized for the difficulties that dyd encountered getting the food trucks to the distribution sites. Kramer said they were doing the best they could. In front of the assembled organizers, Popeye called into question the effort being put forward by the PIN hierarchy. White people, he asserted, could make it happen if they were committed. He publicly
challenged Kramer's commitment. Later, the San Francisco Examiner quoted Governor Ronald Reagan as saying about PIN, I just think there's a characteristic on the part of people that they like something for nothing. As a counterpoint to that statement, the paper quoted Popeye is saying, it's terrible that we have to stoop to things like the Simbonese Liberation Army to
feed people. The PIN food distributions finished on March twenty fifth, nineteen seventy four, less than a month before Popeye's parole revocation hearing. But while the distribution was complete, there was still work to be done in the warehouse and in the accounting for all the incoming and outgoing purchases and donations. Sarah Jane and Popeye were among the many people who remained to do this work. Sarah Jane found Popeye to be both personally and politically impressive. She asked him to
educate her on the politics of the left. She attended United Prisoners Union benefits and events in order to strengthen her ties to him. Randolph First was desperate for any possible leads to Patty's whereabouts. He, like Sarah Jane, had noticed Popeye in the pin Warehouse and learned about Popeye's connection with the radical world. Pop I met with Hurst and came away with a sense that Hurst thought highly
of him. His wife pat Singer would later say Popeye believed Hurst had respect for him as a man and that hearst recognized that he was getting fucked over, getting fucked over by the State of California through its threat to revoke his parole. Popeye suggested to Hurst that he could make informal contact with the SLA. Sarah Jane would serve as a go between for the two men. Author Jerry Spieler Popeye was very powerful politically, you know, in the movement in San Francisco.
He knew everybody and everybody knew him, So, you know, if Randolph Hurst could see that Popeye could help him, he certainly, you know, because it wanted to protect him from prison and be able to help him get his daughterback, because Popeye would have communication available that nobody else would.
It's hard to know how hopeful Hurst was that Popeye could actually follow through on this offer, but he was eager to maintain good relations with the radical left, and he had something that Popeye needed, the power of the press. Hurst owned the San Francisco Examiner, and whether or not there was a formal deal, the Examiner put its weight behind Popeye. In advance of the parole revocation hearing. On April seventh, the paper published an article about the upcoming hearing,
focusing on Popeye's community and prison reform work. Two days later, it ran an editorial titled It's Wrong, opposing revocation of Popeye's parole. It read, in part, we.
Admit to prejudice about Popeye. We've seen him in action the United Prisoners Union, which he had acted as an observer of the People in Need program set up after the Patricia Hurst kidnapping. We've seen him help would help was needed.
Disconnection with Hurst would later be used against Popeye.
Sarah Jane facilitated the relationship between Popeye and Randolph Hurst at the same time she was contacted by the FBI. The FBI had, of course, been involved in the investigation of Patty Hurst kidnapping and had been in and out of Hearst's office at Penn headquarters. In this environment where seemingly everyone was watching everyone else, the agent running the investigation noticed Sarah Jane and saw possibilities.
The FBI and Charlie Bates, who was the agent in charge, saw Sarah Jane as somebody who was connecting with many different people at Penn and did connect with Popeye Jackson, and they saw her as somebody because she didn't look like a radical. She still very much dressed like the neighbor lady or the housewife in Danville, so she could sort of enter into these areas that other people couldn't.
Charlie Bates approached Sarah Jane and she agreed to a meeting. She discussed this meeting at length in a prison interview with Playboy in nineteen seventy six. As instructed by Charlie, she called a number the next morning during her coffee break and was told to stand at a specific street corner and wait for someone to come get her. She did so and was picked up by a green car with an agent named Bert Worthington in the backseat. Worthington
would become Sarah Jane's control officer. In this meeting, Moore says she told the FBI agent that Popeye had offered to be the conduit for communications between Hurst and the SLA. The FBI was dubious that the SLA would trust Popeye, but still it was not out of the question. At a later meeting, they asked Sarah Jane if she knew a particular person in the radical world. Sarah Jane said she'd met him a couple of times. The FBI thought that this was the most likely person to be able
to communicate with the SLA. Sarah Jane has never revealed this man's name. She refers to him as Tom, and his advice to her plays a critical role in her life over the next year and a half. She told Playboy, when the FBI agents told me they thought Tom was in touch with the SLA, I had you're joking. They assured me they were not. I agreed to work with them and Tom became my target, but that didn't mean pulling away from Popeye yet.
I think Sarah Jane, she never said this, but other people have thought it, was very attracted to Popeye because of his power in the political community. He was just a very powerful guy. And she also the FBI wanted her to make sure she befriended him because of who he was and what he knew. So she asked Popeye
to sort of mentor her into the radical community. And so that was their relationship, and Popeye saw an opportunity for somebody to infiltrate things that maybe other people couldn't because Sarah Jane did not fit or look like the mold of the radical in Berkeley or in San Francisco. She just didn't fit that mold. Sarah Jane looked very middle class matron, would sort of stand out as somebody
may be safe. They wouldn't take her seriously because she didn't look the part, and in some ways that can be an advantage that people may not take you seriously and then say things in front of you that they don't think you get.
Six days after, the San Francisco Examiner ran its editorial calling for Popeye Jackson's parole to be kept in place. The world got its first look at Patty Hurst since the kidnapping. She had taken on a new name given to her by the Symbionese Liberation Army, Tanya.
Greeting to the people, this is Tanya. On April fifteenth, my comrades and I expropriated ten thousand, six hundred and sixty dollars and two cents from the Sunset branch of the Hibernia Bank.
Eye witnesses say that as bank robberies go, this one was extremely well planned. FBI agents say the girl identified as Patty Hurst stood right about here, her right hand either on the trigger of the gun or near her pocket, and she was apparently aiming at between five and eight bank employees and customers who were ordered face down behind these counters.
I was positioned so that I could hold customers and bank personnel who were on the floor. My gun was loaded, and at no time did any of my comrades intentionally point their guns at me.
Another one of the sla women in her gun stood about here. Now she had a great view of all the tellers and all the other people in the banks.
I am a soldier and the People's Army Patria. On Wednesday, Sensormaster.
Fascius in sick Place upon the life.
Of the people.
For seventy one days, the nation had fretted about Patty's fate at the hands of the SLA. Now she had appeared as a gun toting comrade of her abductors and a violent bank robbery. Two men were wounded by gunshots when one unknowingly entered the bank during the robbery. A jarring photo of Patty aka Tanya, wielding a semi automatic weapon in the bank ran in newspapers around the world.
On April twenty fourth, a new communicate taking credit for the bank robbery appeared, some of which you just heard. Public opinion changed. Patty Hurst had gone from victim suddenly to radical terrorists. It's hard to overstate how shocking this was. Popeye's parole revocation hearing was set to be held at San Quentin State Penitentiary on April twenty third, nineteen seventy four.
On the evening of the twenty first, six days after the Hibernia bank robbery, an indoor rally of about one hundred people was held at a community center in the Mission District of San Francisco to show support for Popeye. Stephen Weed was there and wrote about what happened at the end in his book. The story he laid out was corroborated by press accounts. Weed says that he left the building and ran into a radio reporter he knew, along with a female friend. Weed stopped and talked with
them on the sidewalk. A police cruiser pulled up to them and asked for identification. Weed and the reporter showed theirs, but the woman said she didn't have hers. This was a problem because the police thought that she looked like Nancy Lee Perry, who was a wonted member of the Symbionese Liberation Army. The woman's name was actually Christine Mummy. The police said she'd have to come to the station with them. Christine Mummy appear currently owed thirteen dollars in
parking tickets. A crowd was leaving the community center and emerged to find Christine arguing with the police. The situation turned tents. Two more squad cars arrived, lights on. A large crowd gathered around, yelling at the officers. The officers yelled back, telling the crowd to back up. Popeye stepped out from the crowd, demanding to know why they were taking Christine in. A sergeant named Louis Calabro yelled at
Popeye to get back on the curb. Popeye stood his ground and the sergeant got in his face, and the two men yelled at each other, not touching, but within inches. The sergeant again told Popeye to get back on the curb, and Popeye again stood his ground. Then quickly Popeye was cuffed and against the squad car, and so less than forty eight hours before he was to go in front of the parole board, Popeye was arrested for verbally abusing
police and allegedly pushing the police sergeant. This was trouble, especially as Popeye had built up so much goodwill among in Floes ruential people, despite his continued advocacy for violent radicalism.
For me, he was a very likable person and he must have struck a lot of people that way, because he won a lot of friends, and especially in the white community at the time he had started seating.
This is Jacob Holt, a Danish photographer who documented life in impoverished black communities in the US during the early nineteen seventies and became a friend of Popeye's.
Even the conservative San Francisco Examiner had had an editorial about how giving Popeye a chance, and Popeye was given a lot of credit in the white media and white schools. He went out and did talks about being black underclass and said got a lot of support from.
Deeple Popeye surely understood the importance of having support from quote unquote respet afected members of the community in facing a parole board whose members had all been appointed by Ronald Reagan. On April twenty third, Popeye was accompanied to the hearing at San Quentin by a radical clergyman named Reverend Cecil Williams of Glide Memorial Church in San Francisco.
I believe that we have to radical eye things to get things done very quickly. Social change means rapid social change, it seems to me. Also, I believe that Jesus Christ was a revolutionary, and he was a radical, and you got to be out there.
As Popeye and Reverend Williams approached the prison entrance, they passed by a group of about two hundred supporters standing in the rain holding free Popeye signs. Popeye had listed thirty five witnesses who might appear on his behalf. This list included Congressman Ron Dellams, a state assemblyman, a parole officer, a television reporter, and several San Francisco policemen. It's not
clear who exactly showed up to testify. Reverend Williams would later say that he testified to Popeye's character and his good works assisting other ex convicts and helping at Glide Memorial Church. In the end, Popeye's parole was not revoked, meaning that he would not face any more prison time. But Popeye was furious. He claimed that he had been coerced into signing documents that imposed more restrictive parole conditions.
He was, for instance, prohibited from traveling beyond a fifty mile radius of San Francisco without permission from his parole officer. He was, however, free to walk out of prison, which he did ten hours after entering, but his day was not done. The supporting crowd had dwindled to about forty people. As Popeye approached them, a male supporter collapsed in an epileptic seizure. Popeye rushed over, got on his knees, and cradled the man's head. For twenty minutes until the ambulance arrived.
Popeye wouldn't be serving more time in prison. With the insular, radical world of San Francisco posed its own dangers to someone with his public notoriety, things would not get easier for him or for Sarah Jane next time on Rip Current.
Rip Current was created and written by Toby Ball and developed with Alexander Williams. Hosted by Toby Ball with Mary Catherine Garrison. Original music by Jeff Sanoff, Show art by Jeff Niya's Goda and Charles Rudder. Producers Jesse funk, Rema O'Kelly and Noms Griffin. Supervising producer Trevor Young, Executive producers
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