Lethal Passage (27 page)

Even the marketers of such books acknowledge their dangers and flaws. Mr. Lund told me he is fully aware the
Cookbook’s
recipes contain dangerous errors: “
They’re wrong. No doubt about it.” But he added, “There are so many copies of that book extant, I don’t see how not selling another one is going to be in any way redeeming.” Billy Blann, owner of Desert Publications, said anyone who tries to act on the directions in Desert’s book
The Poor Man’s James Bond
takes a great risk.
Most of his customers, he said, are “closet commandos” who just like to read on the wild side. “Anybody who fools with this stuff,” he said in a profound Arkansas twang, “has got to be a fool.”

Or, bomb investigators fear, a child.

That Wallingford, Pennsylvania, parent wrote to Paladin after his son received a copy of
The Anarchist’s Cookbook
and, while trying out one of its recipes, blew off the tip of one finger.
In August 1992, two boys in Athens, Tennessee, set off two powerful bombs in a city park. In a search of one suspect’s home, investigators found
The Poor Man’s James Bond
, Volume II, complete with little pink Post-it notes marking crucial pages.
In San Juan Capistrano, California, three young boys were seriously injured when a pipe bomb they were making in one boy’s garage exploded. Members of the Orange County bomb squad searched the boy’s home and in a freezer found a high-explosive solution made from a recipe in the
Improvised Munitions Blackbook
, Volume III, another book published by Billy Blann’s Desert Publications and sold by Paladin and Loompanics. “We’re talking some bad-news stuff,” said Sgt. Charles Stumph, commander of the squad. “He was just taking it through the cooling process, and he was a thirteen-year-old kid.”

Park Elliott Dietz, a forensic psychiatrist and FBI consultant in La Jolla, California, studied Paladin Press and its peers.
In 1983 he set up a dummy company, Hawkeye Industries, through which he corresponded with Paladin and other companies in what he calls the “violence industry.” He used this oblique approach, he said, “because I thought these people were dangerous. Some of them are.”

He no longer placed Paladin in that category, however. “Paladin is so aboveboard in selling the worst of information for profit that there’s no need for any subterfuge with them.” His scrutiny earned him a dedication in one of Paladin’s books—George Hayduke’s
Payback: Advanced Back-Stabbing and Mudslinging Techniques
. Hayduke’s dedication reads, in part: “Park Baby, this book’s for you.”

Dr. Dietz estimates that he is called on to serve as a forensic psychiatrist in fifty to seventy-five criminal cases a year. When he interviews defendants, he said, he asks about the movies and TV shows they watch, the books they read. “And when one asks them,” he told me, “one learns that a large proportion of offenders of the type I’m
asked to see are aware of and interested in these materials. I’ve come to expect bombers, killers using exotic weapons, mass murderers, and political-extremist offenders to have a level of familiarity with the violence industry, including Paladin Press, equivalent to the familiarity of sex offenders with pornography.”

The effect of Paladin’s books and pornography is similar, Dr. Dietz argued. “People with a preexisting interest in tying and torturing women gravitate to such pornography. People with a preexisting interest in mass destruction gravitate to titillating descriptions of that.”

His work brought him into contact with at least two multiple murderers who had read books by Palad
in and its competitors: George Banks, who killed thirteen people in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, and Sylvia Seegrist, who killed three people and wounded seven in Media, Pennsylvania.

In an article in the
Journal of Forensic Sciences
, Dr. Dietz argued that books sold or published by Paladin—in particular the How to Kill series,
Get Even
, and
The Poor Man’s James Bond
—may have been the inspiration for the Tylenol killings of 1982 and subsequent product-tampering cases. As early as 1972, he wrote,
The Poor Man’s James Bond
described how cyanide could be substituted for the drugs in medicinal capsules. The first murder using cyanide in capsules occurred in 1982 in Chicago, in the Tylenol case. Nine other murders followed, six more in Chicago, three others in 1986 in Seattle and Yonkers, New York.

In 1973, Dr. Dietz’s report continued, Paladin’s
How to Kill
suggested adding acid to eyedrops. A few years later a pharmacist allegedly used a similar technique.

In 1981,
Get Even
described a novel means of contaminating a bottled drink. Four years later, someone used the approach in a Santa Clara, California, grocery store.

In 1983, Paladin’s
Hit Man
noted a way of tampering with tea bags to make them deadly. Four years later, Dr. Dietz wrote, a New
Jersey man was convicted of placing similarly contaminated tea bags in a grocery store.

“One of the usually ignored concerns about this industry that 1 would underscore is the effect of exposure on vulnerable members of the community,” Dr. Dietz told me. “It’s the same concern that I have always emphasized ought to be foremost in our thinking about the effects of pornography. It is not relevant what effect if any either pornographic or violent materials have on college-educated, nonantisocial, non-substance-abusing, nonpsychotic persons. What is relevant is the effect on uneducated, substance-abusing, antisocial, or psychotic persons with little or no family or community control, in circumstances where they think they have no witnesses.”

In fact, he argued, vulnerable readers migrate to such material and may incorporate the “worldview” of the publication into their thinking. “My concern,” he said, “is not just that one can learn to build a better bomb this way, but also that through sufficient immersion in this subculture one comes to find a greater need to build the bomb.”

I asked Peder Lund what he thought of Dr. Dietz’s views.

“I really can’t be bothered by him,” he said. Dr. Dietz, he said, had seized on a few aberrant cases to postulate a link between Paladin’s books and crime. “If you take two hundred thousand people, statistically you’re going to find two or three who don’t wear underwear, four or five who cultivate bonsai trees, six or eight who’ve shaved their heads. There’s no statistical validity to the man’s conclusions. It’s as if you went to a party last night and met five people who were divorced and decided the divorce rate had gone up catastrophically.”

Lund dismissed Dr. Dietz’s product-tampering theory as “conjecture.” On the reports of bomb injuries from books published by Paladin and others, Lund said, “As a human, I feel very sorry for anyone who’s put through any physical suffering. As a publisher and as a pragmatist, I feel absolutely no responsibility for the misuse of information.”

Paladin is merely a vehicle for conveying information, he said. “We are not encouraging illegal activity.”

No one, at least no one I could find, has sued Paladin over the ways people put its books to use. “And I think it would be a travesty of the legal system to do so, don’t you?” Lund said. “Do you sue General Motors because a kid runs over his schoolmate in a stolen car? Do you sue the manufacturer of a hammer because a child picks it up and bashes his little sister’s head in? I can’t see any clear-thinking person holding someone responsible for conveying information.”

The U.S. Supreme Court agrees. “
The general rule is, people do have a constitutional right to engage in speech which might cause serious harm or danger to others,” said Bruce Ennis, a First Amendment attorney. Speech, or a written work, can be deemed illegal only when it is virtually certain to lead a listener or reader to an immediate act of violence. “
These are difficult standards to meet,” said Floyd Abrams, considered a leading expert in First Amendment law. “They are
supposed
to be difficult.”

Even bomb investigators, the people who most often encounter the fruits of the violence-industry’s advice, oppose banning such books. “
You can’t say they can’t print this stuff,” said Joe Grubisic, commander of the Chicago bomb squad. “I don’t like it, but I really don’t know what the solution is. I don’t want a police state.”

No problem would exist, argued Sergeant Stumph of Orange County, if Paladin and its peers simply chose not to publish their violence primers. “It’d be so nice if the big R-word would just come into play, if some of these people would just take responsibility for their friggin’ actions.”

Jack Thompson, a Miami lawyer whom the ACLU picked to be one of its 1992 Arts Censors of the Year, took a less indulgent view.
That Paladin can continue to sell a book like
Kill Without Joy
, he said, is evidence of a lack of prosecutorial initiative. “The ACLU has been very successful in convincing an entire generation of prosecutors that you can’t do anything about this stuff,” he said. The majority of
Americans, he argued, want the likes of Paladin Press “aggressively pursued and prosecuted, but they’ve been abandoned because of a lack of will by the government at every level.”

Some books even Paladin will not publish, Lund told me. He will not accept anything racist or “scatological.” He will not publish advice on altitude-sensitive detonation devices. “We don’t want to be the scapegoats for an investigation of an airliner coming down,” he said.

He also said he would not publish books on poisons—although in fact several books in Paladin’s catalog, including
Kill Without Joy
, include tips on the subject. He countered that these references were very general. “We try to avoid publishing specifics.”

But why this scruple if Paladin’s customers are just Walter Mitty types in search of a psychic release?

Lund tipped back his chair. “Perhaps I can’t tell you accurately,” he said slowly. “I find it very offensive, poisoning. Because it’s something done by the devious, it isn’t a direct-confrontation kind of thing.”

“Bombs are pretty devious,” I suggested.

“We all have our boundaries, wouldn’t you say?” His voice was mild, but his gaze turned perceptibly cooler. “Perhaps my boundaries are different from yours. My boundaries are different from many people’s.”

The “aftermarket” bazaar offers far more than mere advice. Dozens of large and small companies peddle all manner of accessories capable of turning your neighborhood bully into a Rambo-esque urban warrior. U.S. Cavalry, a mail-order company in Radcliff, Kentucky, offers “military and adventure equipment,” including laser sights, a “sleeve dagger” meant to be strapped to the user’s arm or leg (complete with “blood grooves” ground into its triangular blade), a plastic hairbrush with a knife embedded in the handle, and all the accessories needed to turn your Mossberg Model 500 shotgun into a tactical
assault gun with front and rear “assault grips,” folding stock, and a perforated barrel shroud that gives the weapon the look of an exotic machine gun.

The lushest source of weapons and accessories remains
Shotgun News
, the thrice-monthly advertising tabloid in Hastings, Nebraska. The front page invariably includes half a dozen ads from companies offering to help people acquire their own federal gun-dealer licenses (“Confused? Call Bob or Jennie today!”). The rest of each issue consists of 150 or more onionskin-like pages of classified and display advertising directed at gun dealers, collectors, and shooters of all tastes.
In July 1989 the newspaper carried an advertisement offering the “Whitman Arsenal,” consisting of the seven weapons and accessories that Charles Whitman brought with him on August 1, 1966, when he climbed the twenty-seven-story clock tower at the University of Texas and spent the next ninety minutes firing away at anyone who happened to fall within his sights. He killed sixteen people, including a receptionist and two tourists in the tower; he wounded another thirty-one. The ad offered the guns along with a copy of the
Life
magazine edition that covered the shooting and called the incident “the most savage one-man rampage in the history of American crime.”

Shotgun
News also carried ads placed by an Athens, Georgia, company for products designed to convert semiautomatic weapons to full-auto machine guns, a company later included in ATF’s wide-ranging effort to discover how the Branch Davidian cult in Waco, Texas, managed to acquire enough firepower to repel the 1993 ATF raid on the compound.

When I opened the July 10, 1992, edition of
Shotgun News
, to which I had subscribed, I found an advertisement for a Nazi tank—“a rare opportunity to own a fine piece of German artillery.” A Chillicothe, Ohio, broker of vintage military vehicles offered the tank for $145,000. “
There’s no difference between owning a tank and a Ferrari except four inches of armor,” he told me during a visit to his office. Oddly enough, such ads may be among the most innocent in
the publication.
Private buyers of tanks tend to be history-loving souls and members of the Military Vehicle Preservation Association, which doesn’t allow live guns of any kind at its various meets.