THE PEOPLE VS. RICHARD MCCASLIN
Jeff Mitchell, public defender, has had some wild days in court. In January of 2007, he found himself in the unusual position of having to repeatedly punch his client in the face when the defendant decided to wrestle a court bailiff. Mitchell saw him going for the bailiff’s gun and hit him until a Deputy Sheriff subdued the criminal with a Taser. But nothing will ever be as strange as his case defending Richard McCaslin.
“I kind of seek out unusual cases. I first heard about the case on the news, and then when I came into the office, I requested it,” Mitchell told me in a phone interview from his office in Sonoma County. “I had heard of the Bohemian Grove, but I didn’t know much about it.”
MEANWHILE, AFTER SPENDING SEVERAL hours in a holding cell, Richard was placed in a small observation room with padded walls to spend the night. There was a small, rectangular window in the door and no furniture. Richard was issued a “paper hospital robe, a ratty blanket, and a thin sleeping mat.” There wasn’t a toilet, just a drain hole in the floor to urinate into. He was moved to a more standard cell the next day and kept in what he calls the “psycho ward” for two weeks.
He didn’t spend this time completely alone. After a period of no personal conversations with anyone, he now found himself and his ideas the center of attention. He was visited by a parade of interrogators, starting with Sonoma County detectives. Then came “several shrinks” who interviewed him on his medical history. Was he aware of any mental illness in his family history? No. Was he currently taking any medications? No. Did he abuse drugs or alcohol? No. Did he have a previous criminal history? No.
The psychiatrists wrote down that they thought he should be “tentatively diagnosed with delusional disorder and adjustment disorder,” according to a court document.
His next visitors were the Secret Service. The two agents asked him the details on his infiltration of the Grove.
“If Bush isn’t a Bohemian Club member, then why are you interrogating me?” Richard asked them. But the Secret Service was also interested in Richard’s symbolic appearances at the White House and on the Texas ranch of “POTUS Bush” (as he’s referred to in Secret Service reports). Richard says he answered their questions and explained his motives truthfully. They shook his hand, wished him luck, and went on their way, but back at Secret Service offices, a large-scale investigation began. They examined his debit card transactions, following his movement across the country with rental cars and hotel rooms, and noted his purchase record at an Austin gun store. Agents were sent out to every city he had stepped foot in, to check local jail and mental hospital records (they all came back “negative”) and interviewed family members and known associates.
To Richard’s surprise, the Secret Service soon returned to interview him for a second round of questioning. This time, they weren’t interested in talking about his raid on the Bohemian Grove, but in his contact with Chely Wright.
“They grilled me for a good hour about my date with Chely. I asked them what business it was of theirs, but they never gave me a straight answer,” Richard recalled.
Richard after his arrest.
SHORTLY AFTER HIS ARREST, Richard had an arraignment. He was charged with five felonies and two enhancements. They were:
Arson: Structure
Arson: Property
Burglary
Exhibiting a Firearm to Police
Possession of a Billy Club
A. Being Armed During the Crime
B. Wearing a Kevlar Vest During the Crime
Richard believes count five is a bit of a stretch—he did have a billy club, but it was in his truck at the time of his arrest.
“It’s just a stick,” he adds. “Bail was set at half a million dollars, which was a joke since the authorities had frozen all my assets so that I couldn’t post bail, or hire my own lawyer. This was a violation of the 8th amendment of the U.S. Constitution,” Richard wrote. He was moved to Mental Health “R” Module in Sonoma County Jail.
Richard was offered a plea deal—plead guilty to the arson charges and get the other charges dropped—but Richard rejected the offer, confident he would be found not guilty by reason of necessity. A trial date for Richard’s case was set for April 9, 2002.
WHILE HE WAITED, RICHARD hoped for a media storm to roll in and give his story exposure. This would be his saving grace, he figured. The sacrifice of his freedom would be worth it when the Bohemian Grove would become the hot news topic of the day, leading to the disclosure of the evil activities that happened there, and the lid would be blown off the society, once and for all. The Secret Service report notes that Richard had a great hope for “notoriety” and even that he might make “monetary gain from book deals and media interviews.”
Right before his raid, according to the Secret Service report, he had mailed letters to then-FOX News personality Bill O’Reilly, The Free American patriot magazine, and local San Francisco television and radio news stations.
From my interviews with Richard, I got the impression that monetary gain was not a motivating factor as much as “notoriety.” But that fame he hoped for didn’t happen.
The story didn’t get traction beyond a few short articles in local press in Northern California. Not surprisingly, Richard attributes this to conspiracy.
“The Bohemians used their clout to block national media coverage,” he wrote. Richard believes one of the few journalists reporting on the story was paid off with a job promotion, not for her hard work, pluck, and gumption, but a kickback for “forgetting” his story. Cecilia Vega is an award-winning (including a 2010 Emmy) journalist who used to write for the Press-Democrat and the San Francisco Chronicle before moving on to television news with ABC. She went on to be an anchor for World News Tonight on ABC, and currently is the network’s senior White House correspondent.
When I e-mailed her to ask about her reporting, she replied that she didn’t recall the case.
“Sorry, I don’t remember anything about that story (I don’t even remember covering the event, let alone the subject). Apologies… that was many moons and many journalism jobs ago,” Vega messaged me.
“That’s a lousy thing to say about the guy who (indirectly) gave her the biggest break of her career,” Richard said when I told him about this response. “I’ve always felt the Bohemian Club bribed or threatened her to drop my story. Vega’s been reaping of her choice ever since.”
I didn’t take Richard seriously, although a heavily armed, skull-masked man raiding the Bohemian Grove was a memorable story.
“Sadly, Vega isn’t just a ‘bad apple,’” Richard continued. “Almost all ‘journalists’ (newsreaders/actors) are forced to lie on a daily basis to keep their jobs. The higher they rise in the ranks, the bigger the lies they have to tell… I’m sure Vega e-mailed her Boho ‘handlers’ and let them know about your e-mail.”
IN READING THROUGH THE letters Richard wrote Lon from prison over the years, there is a consistent desperation for media attention. He asked Lon to send his story to a wide range of outlets, from mainstream to the obscure. There was a letter he wanted Lon to forward to Ira Glass of This American Life, and he repeatedly asked Lon to get the comic version of his life to two Austin filmmakers he thought would be interested in a Phantom Patriot movie: Richard Linklater, director of Slacker, who had cast Alex Jones in a bit role as a street preacher in A Scanner Darkly (2006); and Robert Rodriguez, director of comic book movie Sin City (Richard hoped he had gotten his foot in the door by being an extra on Rodriguez’s movie Spy Kids).
Richard continued to hope that his story was out there and requested Lon to look up media watchdog site Project Censored to see if they had shared any articles on him, and in another letter asked if Snopes had reported on him as an urban legend. In 2006 he wrote to Lon excitedly telling him he thought the movie version of Alan Moore’s vigilante graphic novel V for Vendetta would “reawaken America’s interest in the Phantom Patriot story.” A cartoonist from Nebraska named Neal Obermeyer contacted Richard in prison, telling him he was hoping to put together a documentary on Real-Life Superheroes, including a segment on Richard.
“This is it! This is the opportunity I’ve been waiting for. I knew that some-day, someone in the media would take me seriously,” Richard wrote Lon. But Obermeyer’s documentary never panned out and no other media or movie directors picked up the story.
DESPITE THE SNUBS, RICHARD’S story was picked up by one unlikely messenger: Les Claypool.
Claypool is famous for his mind-bending bass playing, which developed into a signature sound of slaps and twangs with his alternative/prog-rock band Primus, as well as other projects like Oysterhead, and his collaboration with Sean Lennon, The Claypool Lennon Delirium. Claypool lives close to the Bohemian Grove in nearby Occidental, where he has property he’s dubbed “Rancho Relaxo” that includes his house and home recording studio. It’s there that he turned a local news bit into a song titled “Phantom Patriot,” track 6 of his 2006 solo album Of Whales and Woe.
Delivered with Claypool’s signature bouncy bass, the song explains Richard’s raid on the Grove in simplest terms with a dramatic, rousing chorus of “the Phan-tom Paaaatrioottttt.”
After months of trying to get Claypool on the line, his publicists finally arranged ten minutes of phone time for me in January 2016, while Primus was on the road with Tool in Texas. It was an exciting moment for me, as someone who flipped cassettes of Primus albums like Sailing the Seas of Cheese and Pork Soda frequently on my boombox in the ’90s. But Claypool was cautious about the subject of our interview.
“Is he… is he a stable individual, would you say? I don’t want to get on the bad side of someone who isn’t necessarily stable,” is one of the first things Claypool says to me. I then found myself in the odd position of trying to assure Les Claypool that I didn’t believe he was in danger of being stalked and murdered by the Phantom Patriot.
Living as close as he does to the Bohemian Grove, Claypool was familiar with all the lore.
“I’ve had a lot of friends who have worked there over the years, and there’s all this mystery of what happens in the Grove with the Bohemian Club, it’s a collection of the elite as well as a bunch of artists,” Claypool explained. “Actually, my old music teacher was a trombonist for the Bohemian Club way back in the day. But there is this mystery, and a bit of conspira-noia as to what goes on there and some of it is fairly extreme.”
Writing the song, Claypool says, was as simple as an oddball story catching his eye.
“I was flipping through the newspaper and read about the Phantom Patriot, and it struck a chord with me because it was pretty hilarious that this guy went in to challenge these, uh… mysterious forces and he ended up going the wrong time of the year, and there was nobody there.
“The way I approach the things that I do, my craft, is various experiences will strike me a certain way, and they inspire some kind of creativity. Same with this Phantom Patriot thing. I have no intent or agenda, I thought it was an interesting story, and I wanted to convey it with music. We haven’t played it in a while because I haven’t had that band, but it was an enjoyable song to play.”
An animated music video for the “Phantom Patriot” song was released. It depicts an inept commodore struggling with a gang of anthropomorphic cannonballs aboard his ship. The wily cannonballs manage to dupe the commodore, who accidentally blasts a hole in his hull. The cannonballs escape with the rescue boat, cheering and drifting away as the commodore goes down with the ship.
At first, Richard was quite flattered that Claypool had written the ballad, declaring to me that it was a “modern-day folk song.” But his attitude darkened as he began to connect Claypool to the ever-growing web of conspiracy.
“Claypool definitely made this song and video to mock me, probably as a favor to his Bohemian Club member buddies in the Grateful Dead,” Richard wrote. “They were inducted into the Bohemian Club during the 2002 summer encampment. So much for the ‘counterculture’!”
Although it sounds odd, two members of the Grateful Dead, Bob Weir, and Mickey Hart, did indeed become Bohemian Club members, documented by the Bohemian Grove Action Network.
“I’d like to think Jerry Garcia would have never done that,” BGAN founder Mary Moore lamented.
Hart stays at Hill Billies Camp, and Weir is a member of Rattlers Camp. Weir spoke candidly about the Grove during a video interview he did to promote HeadCount, a group that registers voters at concerts.
“I don’t talk about the Bohemian Grove much, because it’s a place where people go to get away from the spotlight,” Weir responded to a question during the interview that came in via Twitter. He fondly described the Grove as a social setting. “I enjoy having a chance to get together with those guys, knock a couple back, and talk it down,” he explained.
“The stuff you hear in the rumor mill, while entertaining, I’ve never caught any virginal sacrifices,” Weir says, while his show hosts and fellow guests laugh.
As for the Claypool and Grateful Dead alliance against him, Richard explains:
“They couldn’t resist rubbing my failure in my face, but they couldn’t risk turning me into a folk hero with a straightforward video. Claypool may have been concerned that I might sue him for copyright infringement or demand residuals. The Grateful Dead probably didn’t like the fact that the Phantom Patriot somewhat resembled their album cover mascot.”
I was confused about why Richard would think the “Phantom Patriot” music video with the cartoon commodore and cannonballs had anything to do with him but was quickly learning that Richard sees a deep symbolism in many things.
For example, Richard would later note in a letter to me that he went to see a movie (he treated himself to superhero movies when they were released in theaters), where he witnessed a preview for Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’hoole, a CGI fantasy adventure featuring a group of talking owls.
“There’s something sinister about the massive publicity for this ‘Owls of Ga’hoole’ movie,” Richard wrote. I could imagine him sitting by himself in the theater, his hand halfway in a bucket of popcorn, staring at the screen in stunned alarm through his 3-D glasses as talking CGI owls swooshed out of the screen directly at his face.
On a second look at the Claypool video, Richard found a hidden story.
“Despite appearances, the Les Claypool video is about me. I had to watch it several times, but I finally figured out the weird symbolism (mostly),” Richard wrote to me. “The bumbling sea captain is me. The cannonball creatures are the Bohemians. The ocean might represent the grove. The sea captain fails to shoot the cannonballs but ends up sinking his own ship. The happy little cannonballs escape in a rowboat labeled ‘HMS Pandora.’ Translation: I failed to shoot/stop the Bohemians from committing their crimes. They help the prosecution to throw me into prison. The Bohos are then free to continue causing trouble for the world.”
When I run this theory past Claypool, he is stupefied, and a bit freaked out.
“That video, it was an animated short I had found online, and I liked it, and it fit with the song really well, I just took the two and put them together. I also did that with another song. My son, especially when he was younger, was a huge animation fan. He would watch all this crazy animation on his computer when he was a kid, and he would turn me on to some of it,” Claypool explains. “The one for ‘Phantom Patriot’ just fit perfectly with that song, so it wasn’t created with him in mind at all, it was just a good fit, kind of like when people watch the Wizard of Oz with Dark Side of the Moon—just a happy coincidence.”
CALLING IN THE HOLLYWOOD BUDDIES
BESIDES LES CLAYPOOL, ANOTHER person to take a run at the Bohemian Grove story was comedian Harry Shearer, well-known for his voice work as various characters on The Simpsons and roles in comedies like This is Spinal Tap and A Mighty Wind. Shearer’s directorial debut, Teddy Bear’s Picnic, was released on March 29, 2002. Richard had been in prison for just a couple of months. The movie is a direct satire of the Bohemian Grove, where Shearer says he was once a visitor. He explained his encounter with the publication Tastes Like Chicken in 2002:
I did an awful lot of research before writing the script. Then, coincidentally, after writing the script, I was invited to the place itself. I got to see the way the place was laid out, how stuff looked, and how people acted. I think I was pretty close to the mark.
Teddy Bear’s Picnic features a group of the world’s most powerful men (played by comedians like Fred Willard, Michael McKean, George Wendt, Kenneth Mars, and Shearer himself) retreating to “Zambezi Glen,” where they witness an “Extinguishing of Time” ceremony in front of the statue of a giant pelican. A couple of disgruntled employees sneak in a video camera and tape the club’s antics, including the men dressing in drag and doing a can-can dance.3
Richard believes the timing of this comedy wasn’t coincidental, as he explained in a letter.
“You may have seen the Simpsons episode where Mr. Burns attends a ‘summer retreat for billionaires.’ I’ve mentioned that Harry Shearer, the voice of Mr. Burns, is a Boho in real life. He was also the producer of ‘Teddy Bear’s Picnic.’ It’s a small world, after all.
It became obvious to me that this movie was slapped together on short notice to confuse the public (at least in the Bay Area) about what really happened in the Grove. I guess I should feel flattered. I stirred up enough rumor and controversy about the Bohos that they had to call in their Hollywood buddies (at the last minute) to help them with damage control.”
This is an example of where a theory of Richard’s is not only implausible but impossible. Shearer did shoot the film in three weeks, but Richard’s timeline is highly flawed. The film was widely released just over two months after his raid; however, it had been in production long before then and screened at the U.S. Comedy Arts Festival, the USA Film Festival, and the St. Louis International Film Festival in 2001, before Richard’s arrest.
The other issue is that “calling in their Hollywood buddies” seemed not to be a great strategy in this case: Teddy Bear’s Picnic was an absolute bomb by Hollywood standards—it grossed just $28,149 at the box office in a limited release. Additionally, the alleged Bohemian Grove media stranglehold seemed to be no help promoting the film; it was slammed in a chorus of negative reviews.
“Tiresomely one note,” said Variety. “The satire is unfocused, while the story goes nowhere,” the San Francisco Chronicle opined. “Unfocused and underdeveloped,” said the New York Times. “Supremely unfunny,” according to the Hollywood Reporter. And the San Francisco Examiner pulled no punches in calling it “an ugly, pointless, stupid movie.”
You would think an all-powerful organization like the Bohemian Club could use its wide-ranging influence to cook up a movie that would be seen by more of the general public.
UNLIKE CLAYPOOL AND SHEARER, the Bohemian Club was not saying “har-de-har-har.”
During this period of various visits from psychiatrists, local reporters, detectives, and Secret Service, Richard did experience an actual Bohemian Club conspiracy. On two occasions, a man visited Richard in jail. He flashed Sheriff’s Department officials a Secret Service badge and “whispered he was an agent,” according to Cecilia Vega’s Sonoma Press-Democrat report (Richard’s theory being of course that this was written before Vega had been “bribed or threatened”), then sat down and grilled Richard on the details of his raid. This Secret Service agent was retired and worked for the security detail of the Bohemian Grove, who was conducting its own probe into the incident.
“Sheriff’s officials said the Grove security man, identified as Martin Allen, misrepresented himself to gain privileged access to McCaslin in the county jail,” Vega reported. Later, the article quotes assistant Sheriff Mike Costa as saying that Allen “took advantage of all the resources available to him to accomplish his mission, which was to see Mr. McCaslin for longer than the 30 minutes granted to him as a civilian.” Costa went on to say that Allen’s “visiting privileges have been revoked.”
But by then, Allen had questioned Richard for hours, asking for every detail on how he had gotten into the Grove and what he had seen inside.
LON, MEANWHILE, WAS SURPRISED to find out what had happened to his stuntman classmate and friend.
“I think I got a call from the Secret Service first. I know I got a call from the local sheriff, a local detective, and the Secret Service. I was on my way up to Vallejo to direct a show. Eventually, I was able to talk to Richard and then get up there to see him. He was still in County, still in the psych ward.”
Lon grabbed a phone handset and talked to Richard through a thick panel of glass.
“He told me what had happened and his motivation, but he was a little tight-lipped. I said, ‘Regardless of what happened, you’re here. So, what’s the next thing?’” Richard granted Lon power of attorney so he could help sort out his finances. Lon set to work, helping to figure out what to do with Richard’s property.
“I got the paperwork to get his truck out of impound, and I got it the day before the tow truck guy was going to impound it, put it up for auction, buy it, and give it to his son.” Lon tried to get Richard’s few valued possessions—his collection of comic books and swords, photos, art—from his apartment in Carson City. He tried to get the items in exchange for rent owed and “made many generous offers” but found that the landlords had probably sold them all, mad they had suddenly lost a tenant. Lon ended up taking them to court. He stayed in contact with public defender Jeff Mitchell, “trying to keep him thinking on the case,” and later helped with filing appeals. He used Richard’s account to buy items he wanted for his prison time, and handled payments Richard wanted to send to people.
I asked Lon why he would bother with all that work and why he didn’t say “good luck” and leave Richard to his own devices in prison.
“He was a good guy and needed someone to look after him,” Lon said. “I talked to his mom, probably shortly before she died. She wanted to be sure that he had friends, she was worried, and I’m not sure he had a lot of friends. He had some friends down in Houston, and in talking to them, it wasn’t clear if they were tight.”
ALTHOUGH LON WAS WILLING to offer support, a key person in the motivation for the Bohemian Grove raid, Alex Jones, was not.
“I thought it was irresponsible that he offered no support or didn’t accept any responsibility,” Lon says. Jones had given Richard motivation, fired him up, and even provided driving instructions to get to the Grove, but acted surprised that anyone had taken him seriously when confronted with Richard’s actions.
“I think it’s horrible… sounds completely insane,” he told the Press-Democrat, adding he was “shocked.”
“I talked to Alex Jones, I called him,” Jeff Mitchell told me while describing how he prepared for the case. He was curious if Jones had produced any other media on the Bohemian Grove that Richard might have seen. “He didn’t want to talk very much. He was kind of nervous about fallout, maybe he can be held responsible in some way, I think he was worried about that. He didn’t want to have anything to do with the case, so our conversation was pretty brief.”
This would become a regular routine for Alex Jones—he beats the war drum but ducks for cover when people take him seriously, and the shit hits the fan.
Mitchell remains convinced that the Dark Secrets video is a vital part of the story.
“Based on that tape, I saw the progression of his thought process,” Mitchell explained. “The way he explained it was, the tape not so much changed him as evolved him into more of an anti-government Constitutionalist. I saw how he got there, I didn’t need to embrace those views to defend him, but I could see how he progressed and got to that point.”
COURT CASE #SCR-31916, THE People vs. Richard McCaslin began with jury selection on April 8 (potential jurors were asked things like “do you believe in Government conspiracy?”), and the trial started the next day.
The case was presided by Judge Elliot Lee Daum, who Richard says “had ‘Bohemian tool’ written all over him.”
Prosecutor Charles Arden spent the next few days offering and receiving into evidence photos of the crime scene, a map, and Richard’s weapons and Phantom Patriot costume as exhibits. He called to the witness stand a parade of everyone Richard had encountered: Grove security and maintenance people, arresting officers, and detectives.
A transcript of the trial shows that prosecutor Charles Arden often found himself on a merry-go-round trying to examine Richard, as in this exchange, after he introduces a picture of Richard’s weapons into evidence:
Q: Would you consider that a lot of arms?
A: That’s a subjective opinion.
Q: I’m asking you. Do you consider that a lot of arms?
A: To the average person.
Or in this exchange in which Arden asks about the police response at the Grove:
Q: These police officers that came acted very appropriately according to you, right?
A: Yes.
Q: Even meeting up with this horrifying situation created by you, right?
A: Your word would be horrifying.
Q: What would your words be?
A: Unusual.
Q: How unusual?
A: Very unusual.
Mitchell had put together the best case he could. He even had a chance to visit the Bohemian Grove.
“In preparation of criminal cases, it’s really common to go to the crime scene, it’s just something you usually do, so I sought to go there so I’d have a better idea of how the events unfolded. Since it was a private club, I had an agreement with them that what I saw I would only use in preparation for the case, so I have to honor that agreement. I can tell you I didn’t see anything unusual,” but Mitchell adds that what he got to see was “very limited to the areas pertaining to Richard’s activities in the case, where he encountered people and where he lit the fire.”
The next frustrating development in the case was that the court barred introducing Alex Jones’ Dark Secrets: Inside Bohemian Grove video into the trial as evidence.
“Our defense was going to be based on that video made by Alex Jones, that he reasonably believed that he needed to go in there to stop a criminal activity that he believed was going on. It’s a common necessity defense, that the greater harm of what he believed was happening in the Grove necessitated him going in and breaking the law. I knew that it would be difficult to put on as a defense. One of the difficulties of putting on such a defense is you have to be able to show there is some significant imminent harm that is going to happen to someone. We didn’t have evidence of that; we had his belief based on the video. I had the court review the video, the court watched it, and then they denied us putting that on his defense. In the appellate decision, the appellate court addressed that, and they agreed with the trial court. They felt under the law, the tape was properly excluded, and that defense was not allowed.”
“Frankly I didn’t allow the jury to see that tape because I found the tape to be not only of such poor quality in terms of its production value, to say the least, but the message that it put out and the effort to try to foment and agitate where there was nothing to agitate about,” Judge Daum said in his sentencing decision, adding that Dark Secrets was a “waste of time” and a “piece of trash.”
On April 15, at 3:41 p.m., the day ended with closing arguments from Charles Arden on behalf of the People and from Jeff Mitchell in Richard’s defense.
“ON THE ONE HAND I think he hoped the jury would validate and side with him, but on the other hand, he also expressed to me that he didn’t think he was going to walk out of there,” Mitchell explained. I think he saw both sides of it. In his statements to the police, he admitted he had done everything. The whole issue wasn’t who did it or what was done; it was why he did it. There was a hope that he would prevail, and the jurors would see his side.”
Richard was allowed to address the court. He said that the court had tried to say he was crazy, but he remained convinced about the Bohemian Grove. “Prove me wrong. Get an investigation in there,” he told Judge Daum. “It all boils down to if you want to know the truth or not.”
He added that he had no plans to attempt something like his Bohemian Grove raid again.
“This was a one-time deal. Honestly, it’s my opinion that this country isn’t worth fighting for anymore,” Richard said.
On day six of the trial, April 16, the jury commenced deliberations at 10 a.m. and returned to the courtroom an hour and five minutes later. The verdict was that they had unanimously found Richard “guilty” on all five felony counts and enhancements.
TO ADD TO RICHARD’S bad news, his chances of a media blitz faded away. Court TV and other national media milled around outside of the courtroom, waiting to interview Jeff Mitchell on Richard’s case. However, the trial was happening at the same time as another case in the courthouse. Reverend Donald Kimball was a Roman Catholic priest on trial for allegations of raping and molesting teenage girls. He would also be charged with felony assault and vandalism for an incident during the trial in which he attacked a photographer for the San Francisco Chronicle. It was a high-profile case—Connie Chung had interviewed him for CNN—and when a break in the case happened, the assembled media personnel took off down the hall to get to the other side of the courtroom. Richard’s case was left in the dust, and he attributes this, again, to conspiracy.
“It is my belief that the Bohemian Club used their considerable influence to manipulate Kimball’s case into a national media circus,” Richard wrote. “This tactic served two purposes. First and most importantly, it pushed the Phantom Patriot story into obscurity. Second, it was another opportunity to embarrass organized religion in general and the Catholic Church in particular. An anti-Christian cult, like the Bohemian Club, would enjoy this immensely.”
RICHARD’S “SONOMA COUNTY FELONY Presentence Report,” dated May 7, 2002, listed several factors to consider while determining his sentence. They listed “Favorable Factors” like no prior record or evidence of substance abuse. “Imprisonment could have a detrimental effect on the defendant,” they conclude.
“Unfavorable Factors” stretches to four paragraphs and includes this statement:
The defendant is an intelligent and engaging person, with an air of sadness about him. Prior to this offense, his life appears to have largely been reflective of an inability to realize his goals, and a difficulty connecting with others. Currently, he remains absolutely convinced of his beliefs, and there is nothing to indicate that he is likely to move from that stance. He believes there is both historical precedent and biblical example for his actions. He has no regrets for his conduct, and states that his “conscience is clear.” He also states that although he is disappointed in the lack of support he has received for his position, he does not plan on repeating this kind of behavior in the future.
The report goes on to say that Richard “remains entrenched in his delusional [Richard adds quote marks around this last word with pen before mailing the paper to me] beliefs and is not open to conceding that he may be in error.” Because of this, they say, “He is felt to be absolutely unsuitable for release into the community. We have no faith that the defendant will just quietly return to his home in Texas and put this behind him… Although the defendant presents as a mild-mannered personality, he has shown without a doubt that he presents an extreme danger to anyone he chooses to target. In this offense, he was fully prepared to die, and to take as many others with him as he could [Richard crosses this last line out with pen], in the name of his ‘convictions.’” [Richard crosses out the quote marks around the word “convictions.”]
The report notes that Richard had one incident in a section titled “In-Custody Behavior.”
On February 11, 2002, correctional officers found poems, which were handed over to the Secret Service, and their report mentions being given a poem titled “Warlocks of Washington,” that names Bush, Cheney, Powell, Rumsfeld, and Ashcroft by last name with the final line reading “the Warlocks of Washington must fall.” Another poem, “The Trial for the Truth,” was “about himself, ‘the Phantom Patriot,’ and the upcoming judicial proceedings.”
The presentence report ends with a recommendation that parole be denied and that he be sentenced to nine years, eight months in state prison.
The Bohemian Club had not commented on the case, but they did send a letter to Judge Daum dated May 7, 2002. They mentioned how much the incident had frightened their employees and noted correctly that “Mr. McCaslin did not indicate, and has never indicated, remorse for his actions. He testified that he thought his conduct, including killing, was justified because of his bizarre claims about criminal activity in the Grove,” and that the circumstances combine “to warrant an enhanced sentence of Mr. McCaslin, which is needed to protect the community.”
Richard’s sentencing took place on May 14. Judge Daum threw the book at him and sentenced him to 11 years, eight months in state prison.
JEFF MITCHELL AND LES Claypool had one last encounter with the Phantom Patriot, together.
“His case was long over, the appeal was done, it was probably a year or two since his case was done, and I was just clearing out papers that had come into my inbox and I happened to see one, Richard McCaslin something,” Mitchell recalled. “It was a notice of disposition of exhibits in the case since all the appellate periods had run. They were going to destroy the exhibits, and I thought ‘that uniform is going to be destroyed, that would be kind of an interesting thing to have,’ so I talked to my boss and I said I want to see if the district attorney would agree to let me have it. He said ‘you can ask to have it, but don’t ask for the matching bulletproof vest,’” Mitchell laughed.
“I talked to the D.A., and he agreed, with the stipulation I wouldn’t display it publicly and wear it out or give it back to Richard or anything like that. I could have it just for my personal use in my office.”
Enter Les Claypool.
“I knew he had written a song called ‘Phantom Patriot’ because my younger sister is a big Primus fan. I knew about it, then one day I was going through the calendars at court, looking at what cases were coming through, and the name ‘Les Claypool’ caught my eye.”
Claypool, Mitchell recalls, was in for a misdemeanor for “some minor fish and game violation, fishing in the Russian River with a barbed hook. I thought, wow, I’ve never heard of anyone else named Les Claypool, so I went up to court and checked around, and it was him, so I said, ‘if you want, I’ll represent you.’ We got the fine reduced and secured his ticket. I told him I represented Richard, and I told him I had Richard’s uniform. I said, if you want to check it out, come into my office, and I’ll get it.”
“I was actually really impressed. I thought it was well-made,” Claypool recalled in my phone conversation with him. “It was kind of cool.”
I asked Claypool for any final thoughts on the Phantom Patriot.
“I hope he can move through life and conquer his demons. I don’t actually… like I said this is a little touchy for me; I’m sort of surprised I’m doing this interview, ’cause it does make me a little nervous, especially hearing he is so sensitive to things that he is offended by animated videos. I don’t need that in my life. I mean, I’m just a bass player raising a couple kids.”
RICHARD SERVED HIS FIRST 90 days in San Quentin State Prison. Opened in 1852, San Quentin is so big it has its own zip code, and is home to the largest death row in the United States. It’s been home to a long list of notorious criminals and immortalized in pop culture like Johnny Cash’s live album recording a performance at the prison.
“San Quentin,” Cash sings to the prisoners, who explode in cheers, “may you rot and burn in hell.” Richard was held here in a crowded cell.
“San Quentin is old, very old. They’ve been talking about tearing it down for years. Some of the walls look like they’re from the Civil War era,” Richard says. “They consider it a transfer prison unless you’re a lifer. You’re not supposed to be there more than 90 days before you’re transferred somewhere else. Of course, they take the maximum time to do the paperwork, so on my 90th day, I was transferred to Soledad.”
Correctional Training Facility, commonly known as Soledad State Prison, is located five miles north of Soledad, California, approximately 130 miles south of San Francisco. The overcrowded facility was opened in 1946 and can hold up to 3,312 prisoners, but as of a 2012 census, it was close to double the capacity with 5,636 inmates. This was where Richard would spend the next six years, assigned prison number T54990.
He was escorted to his cell and standing in front of the cell door with his personal effects in his arms, and he was asked one blunt question by his new cellmate, Joe [I’m redacting his last name]:
“How long do you have?”
RICHARD WOULD SPEND ABOUT the first three years of his sentence sharing a cell that he describes as being the size of an average bathroom with his “cellie” Joe.
“We had a good many things in common,” Richard told me, describing Joe. “He was ex-Army; I was an ex-Marine. Joe was a Midwesterner, from Detroit, and was about my age, a year or two older. He was a lifer,” Richard explained. “He didn’t talk much about his prison history, but he had been in at least ten years by then. The building I was in was about a third to half lifers. You had four types in there. The lifers, I realized, weren’t exactly career criminals, they were guys that had screwed up really bad once or got caught once. Then there were gangbangers, illegal immigrants, and mentally ill guys, the worst of the mentally ill were in a separate yard.”
Joe was serving a life sentence for killing his wife, according to Richard.
“He had physically caught her with another guy,” Richard says. “I thought that was a soap opera thing, but I guess guys actually walk in on their wife with another guy.”
After speaking with Richard, I looked up Joe online in the California prison system and wrote to him in 2015 and ’16. I found he had been transferred to Avenal State Prison, about halfway between San Francisco and Los Angeles.
“I didn’t think he was strange at all,” Joe wrote about Richard. “He carried himself like an adult, had good manners. We got along well, with no trouble. We talked and enjoyed a lot of the same TV shows. But the best way to do time with other people is to have some conversation but don’t just talk and talk to hear yourself speak. A lot of people in prison talk and talk and talk and never shut up, and they don’t have anything to say. And the biggest reason is they are afraid to be alone in their own head!”
“IT’S STRANGE HOW YOU get used to it,” Richard says. “You develop a system where only one guy is on the floor at a time. You put up a sheet when you use the bathroom, all kinds of odd things you learn to do. You make strings out of torn-up sheets, intertwine them to make rope. You’re better off washing and drying your own T-shirts and underwear because if you have new ones and you send them out to prison laundry, you might not get them back.”
Richard had Lon place an order and furnished Joe and himself with a TV.
“You could buy a TV from the prison store, 100 bucks,” Richard explained. “All the appliances were made with clear plastic so you couldn’t hide contraband in it. Joe didn’t have a TV, his mom hadn’t sent him money for a while. He had a radio, but I said, I’m not doing time without a TV. We set up a little shelf for it.”
I asked Joe if he and Richard had favorite TV shows they would watch.
“There are not a lot of TV stations in most prisons, usually around 6–7 TV stations. Not 175 like everyone else in the world gets! Ha ha. Well, let me see? We used to watch NFL Sunday, Austin City Limits, country music videos, and we used to watch that guy that paints on PBS, he had a big afro and beard, white guy [The Joy of Painting with Bob Ross]. We also used to watch this kind of cartoon called Teletubbies, it was kinda strange but also interesting enough. Other PBS shows, nature and science stuff. Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy.”
“Joe and I enjoyed your appearance on CSI,” Richard wrote to Lon after he guest-starred on the show in 2003.
Joe also told me the story of how he and Richard got a new cellie named Buddy, a mouse caught in one of the education department classrooms. Joe brought Buddy back to the cell to meet Richard. They kept him in a plastic container at first, but he was so tame and calm, they soon let him wander free, building him a small box home with a hole in it and a braided rope to climb up near their TV.
“He always climbed up on my leg and sat there on my lap,” Joe wrote. “He would run up my arm and sit on my shoulder while we watched TV. He was quite playful and stayed right next to us all the time. We fed him mostly nuts, crackers, a little lettuce. But he loved puddings! Chocolate pudding became his favorite.”
Buddy hung around about a year with Joe and Richard before he disappeared, Joe said.
AFTER A COUPLE OF years, Richard transferred out of his cell with Joe.
“You start with a certain amount of points, based on what your felonies are. If you don’t get in trouble, your points reduce. After they reduce to a certain level, they move you to a different yard, and you get a few more privileges and all that,” Richard said. He left his TV to Joe, who traded a footlocker in exchange. He says it was somewhat of a lateral move—he switched from a cramped cell to an overcrowded dorm room.
“To be honest, I was better off with Joe, because they put me in a dorm where the capacity was double what it was supposed to be. It wasn’t to code at all. One year the feds came in to inspect and what they did was move some of the bunks to the gymnasium before the inspection so they would pass occupancy.”
RICHARD DID SEE CHELY Wright again. But it was in the form of a dog-eared copy of For Him Magazine. Wright’s image had been toned down early in her career, but the FHM shoot was all black leather and lacy things. Richard looked at these photos under the harsh lights of Soledad.
“It was surreal to see Chely in a magazine and remember how we talked and laughed in the limo,” Richard wrote.
“I CAME CLOSE TO a couple fights in there, always stupid stuff. I worked as what they called a porter or a janitor,” Richard told me. His new job paid about $20 a month. “There were guys who always wanted a favor, wanted to get stuff you could get as a janitor. It’s a dog-eat-dog world for scraps in there.”
A memorable moment was witnessing a prison riot.
“I was in my dorm, sitting on my bunk drawing comics and it went off,” Richard remembers. “Usually with riots, it’s somebody who didn’t pay a drug debt, can’t pay it, go to their homies for help. Very few guys in prison handle their own problems, they go to their homies, and it turns into a group argument.”
As the riot broke out, an alarm went off, indicating everyone was on “lock-down.”
“Old scores were being settled all over the dorm. I wasn’t affiliated with anyone like the skinheads or anyone. They respected me, I was older than most of them. They called me an ‘O.G.’ They’ll say that means ‘Original Gangster,’ but I think it meant ‘Old Guy.’ They knew I was an ex-Marine who had done something funky to stick it to the man, so they respected that and didn’t pressure me to join.”
Richard watched the riot from his bunk and from the window he saw “there were probably over 300 guys in the yard, it looked like everybody was fighting everybody else.” Rocks and debris were thrown as guards teargassed the yard. He says the prison was intentionally vague of the damage the riot caused. “It’s not like they put it on the bulletin board. The rumor was one guy got stabbed to death, and a couple more broke arms or legs getting pushed over the second-floor rails. By prison standards, that’s pretty tame.”
After the riot was contained, the prisoners were all moved to the prison yard, where they sat cross-legged, hands cuffed with zip ties.
“You’re all sitting out there for hours like you’re in a fricking Nazi concentration camp while they go through all the bunks and lockers. The riot went off in the afternoon, 2 or 3, and we were out there until after sunset, 10 or 11 at night.”
Prison was a harsh environment for Richard, who had never been to jail before, never even really been exposed to a criminal element. Now stuck in an overcrowded prison, Richard wanted to escape into the fantasy world of comic books and conspiracy theories again.
Cover of Prison Penned Comics, 2008, Richard McCaslin.
3 A more recent parody of the Bohemian Grove took place in season five, episode eight of House of Cards in 2017. President Frank Underwood visits the “Elysian Fields,” where a ceremony takes place in front of the statue of a giant crow, and the motto is “buzzing bees here not sting.”
