Speaker 1: Mmm, Hello friends, I'm Robert Evans, and this is Behind
Speaker 1: the Bastards, the show where we tell you everything you
Speaker 1: don't know about the very worst people in all of history.
Speaker 1: Every week I sit down with a guest and read
Speaker 1: them an exhaustively detailed story about one of the worst
Speaker 1: people in all of history. My guest is coming in
Speaker 1: cold and this week my guest is Ever Maynard, star
Speaker 1: of The Fields on Netflix. Uh. Comedian, writer, improviser, stand
Speaker 1: up stand up performer, actress, actress more. Yeah. Yeah, I'm
Speaker 1: a double actress. Let's talk about or a heroine. But
Speaker 1: but who will make you want to shoot up some heroin?
Speaker 1: Charles Coke? Um? Yeah. Today's episode is titled Charles Coke,
Speaker 1: The Luke Skywalker of Rich People. Uh. And that's that's
Speaker 1: who we're gonna be talking about today. Before we get
Speaker 1: into this, I have some nacho cheese der rito's. Ever
Speaker 1: are you Are you a fan of nacho cheese doritos.
Speaker 1: I'm not really digging those right now. I got through phases.
Speaker 1: That's not going to help us getting a sponsorship deal.
Speaker 1: Oh I love nacho cheese doritos. Sometimes I make nacho
Speaker 1: cheese doritos with cool ranch Doritos and really have a
Speaker 1: party in the mouth Doritos the chips for everyone nailed it,
Speaker 1: and inside, I'm gonna do a I'm gonna do a
Speaker 1: sound effect and oh a, s mr, I didn't know
Speaker 1: what you're doing that. This is the sound of of
Speaker 1: of ever enjoying a delicious Dorito's chick Love nacho cheese
Speaker 1: flavored chips. So good. Well, now that we're fortified, are
Speaker 1: you ready to dig into the tale of Charles Coke? Oh? Yeah,
Speaker 1: all right. There's nothing sexier than being a rebel. That's
Speaker 1: why Hollywood has for decades glorified gangsters and pirates. That's
Speaker 1: why the lost cause myth of the Confederacy still has traction.
Speaker 1: That's why people are so eager to identify with the
Speaker 1: hashtag resistance. There's something deep in the marrow of our
Speaker 1: nation that makes Americans want to be seen as plucky
Speaker 1: resistance fighters, each flinging towards our own personal death stars.
Speaker 1: But what happens when your entire existence is the antithesis
Speaker 1: of rebellion? What happens of you, through sheer accident of birth,
Speaker 1: wind up with hundreds of millions of dollars. Oddly enough,
Speaker 1: that guy can and we'll find some way to make
Speaker 1: himself feel like a rebel. Today we'll be talking about
Speaker 1: the story of one such man, Charles Coke, who, despite
Speaker 1: being born into impossible fortune, came to believe that he
Speaker 1: and his fellow rich people were the most discriminated class
Speaker 1: in America. Over the course of a convoluted and bloody career,
Speaker 1: Charles Coke would become the driving force behind the infamous
Speaker 1: Coke Brothers and build a rebellion with a goal no
Speaker 1: less extreme than the destruction of the U. S. Government
Speaker 1: as we know it. I don't see a problem so far.
Speaker 1: You're you're on board with this guy. So far. You
Speaker 1: agree with rich people really taking one for the guys.
Speaker 1: See what I mean, already getting hated on. I feel
Speaker 1: your rich people. What's up? Yeah, yeah, they've taken too much?
Speaker 1: Uh yeah, okay. Uh So I should note right now
Speaker 1: the tale of Charles Coke is one of those rare
Speaker 1: stories in journalism where there is a single, indispensable reporter
Speaker 1: behind much of the coverage. If you're gonna talk about
Speaker 1: sexual assault in Hollywood, Ronan Farrow is going to come
Speaker 1: up a lot. If you're going to talk about Blackwater
Speaker 1: and Eric Prince Jeremy's a hill is going to come
Speaker 1: up a lot. Uh. And for the Koke brothers, it's
Speaker 1: a reporter named Jane Mayer. She wrote a book, Dark Money,
Speaker 1: in Steen that delved into their past and the network
Speaker 1: of billionaire influencers they assembled to change American politics. If
Speaker 1: you have read a long, scary article about the Koch
Speaker 1: brothers in Politico or The New Yorker or pretty much
Speaker 1: anywhere else, there's a very good chance she wrote it.
Speaker 1: So she's we owere a lot on this podcast, and
Speaker 1: dark Money is a big source here. Now, our story
Speaker 1: today begins back before any of the Koch brothers were born.
Speaker 1: In nine, Fred Coke, the patriarch of the Coke family,
Speaker 1: invented a new way to refine crude oil into gasoline Alas.
Speaker 1: This scientific breakthrough made him a threat to the big
Speaker 1: oil companies, and since this was the twenties, everyone was
Speaker 1: even more corrupt than they are now. He was boxed
Speaker 1: out of the industry and sued into oblivion for patent
Speaker 1: infringement and other nonsense. So far not looking good for
Speaker 1: these guys. It seems like there's no way to pull
Speaker 1: themselves out of this hole. Nervous but just wait. Fred
Speaker 1: Coke Law battled the oil companies for fifteen years, and
Speaker 1: eventually the court settled in his favor and awarded him
Speaker 1: one point five million dollars you know, in like thirties money,
Speaker 1: which is, you know, pretty pretty good money to have
Speaker 1: a million of um. They won because it was found
Speaker 1: out that the oil companies had bribed one of the
Speaker 1: judges who had initially ruled against him. In her book
Speaker 1: Dark Money, Mayor quotes a family friend of the coax
Speaker 1: Is saying the fact that the judge was bribed completely
Speaker 1: altered their view of justice. They believe justice can be
Speaker 1: bought and the rules are for chumps, which they are.
Speaker 1: We don't agree the rules are for chumps, but maybe
Speaker 1: that makes more sense when you're jaywalking less, when y're
Speaker 1: so far I'm still on board. I don't see what
Speaker 1: the problem. Yes, yeah, I mean, look, Fred was screwed.
Speaker 1: This is so Far's he's the hero of the story.
Speaker 1: Oil company. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm on board with Fred
Speaker 1: Coke so far. He just pulled some money out of
Speaker 1: their and he went to the dark side because he
Speaker 1: was like, wait a minute, you can budge justice. Well
Speaker 1: that's kind of exactly. Well, First off, while he's still
Speaker 1: admired and this lost stuff, he finds himself hard up
Speaker 1: for some money, you know. Of course, of course, because
Speaker 1: he's fighting the oil companies. That's not easy. Wentworth, he
Speaker 1: did calle j but the last name was Stalin, or
Speaker 1: rather Joseph Stalin called him. Because the Soviet Union was
Speaker 1: just starting to be a thing at this point nineteen
Speaker 1: thirty uh, and they sent Fred Coke a telegram being like, hey,
Speaker 1: we could use some help making some refineries, and you
Speaker 1: seem pretty good at refining oil. And Fred Fred was
Speaker 1: not read uh, did not like the Communists, but he
Speaker 1: was sympathetic to their money, and they agreed to pay
Speaker 1: him half a million dollars cash in advance. UM. So
Speaker 1: he helped them refine a bunch of oil and build
Speaker 1: Like his company, Winkler, Coke trained Soviet engineers and helped
Speaker 1: put together fifteen new oil refineries inside the USSR. UH. So, yeah,
Speaker 1: he does this work for the Soviets. It's great. Um.
Speaker 1: If you hop over to Coke in dot com ko
Speaker 1: c H I n D dot com the Coke Industries website,
Speaker 1: you can find a timeline of the company history. And
Speaker 1: in the nineteen twenties thirty section of the timeline. There
Speaker 1: are two entries, one for nine when Coke Winkler was formed,
Speaker 1: and another for nineteen thirty two when they took on
Speaker 1: their work for Joseph Stalin and the U. S. S R.
Speaker 1: Then the timeline jumps to nineteen forty in a parade
Speaker 1: of boring oil acquisitions. Now the timeline of the company
Speaker 1: website leaves out a job. Yeah yeah, and this job
Speaker 1: occurred in the mid nineteen thirties. Uh. In nineteen thirty four,
Speaker 1: Winkler Coke Engineering went a contract help design and construct
Speaker 1: an oil refinery in Hamburg, Germany. UH Now the company
Speaker 1: that hired where Yeah that sucks? Yeah, so yeah. The
Speaker 1: coke industries to this day doesn't really like to acknowledge
Speaker 1: the fact that they got their start in part by
Speaker 1: working for the Nazis. Yea, most of the Republican Party
Speaker 1: doesn't like to acknowledge. No, you can definitely find some
Speaker 1: ties to the bushes as well. So now, in UH four,
Speaker 1: the company that hired Coke's company was an American company
Speaker 1: as well. It was run by a guy named William
Speaker 1: Davis who was a big time Nazi sympathizer. UM and
Speaker 1: he was trying to help Germany's oil industry get off
Speaker 1: the ground. Now, back in World War One, Germany had
Speaker 1: starved halfway to death under a brutal British naval blockade.
Speaker 1: Germany's an ability to feed its people and supply its
Speaker 1: military without trade was a huge source of concern for
Speaker 1: Adolf Hitler in the Nazis. Hitler's goal in the nineteen
Speaker 1: thirties and the pre war period was for Germany to
Speaker 1: reach a state of autarchy or self sufficiency, so they
Speaker 1: wouldn't need to trade with the world in order to
Speaker 1: meet their basic needs in case they wound up going
Speaker 1: to war with the world again. Uh So Hitler was,
Speaker 1: you know, modernizing the German military and buying a metric
Speaker 1: fuckload of tanks and airplanes, so gasoline factored heavily in
Speaker 1: his plans for autarchy. This was not hidden news at
Speaker 1: the time. The president of One American bank refused to
Speaker 1: fund Davis's planned refinery because he didn't want to help
Speaker 1: the Nazis rearm Other people eventually did put up the cash, though,
Speaker 1: and Fred Coke played an into rural role in planning
Speaker 1: and building the new refinery, which would go on to
Speaker 1: become the third largest refinery in the Third Reich. The
Speaker 1: factory that Coke built for HIT didn't just make a
Speaker 1: lot of fuel, and made high octane fuel, the kind
Speaker 1: of fuel you'd used to say, keep the Liftwaffa flying.
Speaker 1: You would almost compare it to drinking celsius. But I won't, No,
Speaker 1: we can. We can talk shit on celsius unless they
Speaker 1: start offering us money. No, I'm talking about being high
Speaker 1: octane jet um. So. Fred Coke went on to loadly
Speaker 1: regret his work with the Soviet Union in the year's past,
Speaker 1: but he never really talked much about what he'd done
Speaker 1: with the Nazis, at least after the fact. The time
Speaker 1: that he'd spent in the repressive Soviet regime seemed to
Speaker 1: have a huge impact on him. He would, you know,
Speaker 1: constantly talk about the dangers of government control and what
Speaker 1: was bad about having you know, too large of a government.
Speaker 1: But he didn't hate all governments, just the socialist ones.
Speaker 1: In nineteen thirty eight, he visited several countries, including Imperial
Speaker 1: Japan and New Zealand. He described New Zealand as quote
Speaker 1: violently socialistic. But he wrote this in a letter to
Speaker 1: his mentor about Japan German in Italy. Quote. Although nobody
Speaker 1: agrees with me, I am of the opinion that the
Speaker 1: only sound countries in the world are Germany, Italy and
Speaker 1: Japan simply because they are all working and working hard.
Speaker 1: The laboring people in those countries are so proportionately much
Speaker 1: better off than they are any place else in the world.
Speaker 1: When you contrast the state of mind in Germany today
Speaker 1: with what it was in you begin to think that
Speaker 1: perhaps this course of idleness, feeding at the public trough,
Speaker 1: dependence on government, et cetera, with which we are afflicted
Speaker 1: is not permanent and can be overcome. So that's Fred
Speaker 1: Coke being like, wouldn't it be great if we could
Speaker 1: get rid of the New Deal and be like the Nazis.
Speaker 1: That's where his head is in nineteen thirty eight. Now,
Speaker 1: World War Two happened and Fred Coke, Yeah, Fred Coke
Speaker 1: pulled away on on sympathizing with the Nazis openly. The
Speaker 1: refinery he'd helped to build was destroyed in June of
Speaker 1: nineteen forty four, after years of being targeted by the Allies.
Speaker 1: For civilians died in various Allied raids on the city
Speaker 1: that the refinery was in, uh Coke stopped talking openly
Speaker 1: about fascism, but continued to warn the world about socialism.
Speaker 1: According to the two fourteen books Sons of Wichita, Fred
Speaker 1: became convinced that a global war between capitalism and socialism
Speaker 1: was inevitable. Quote, I think these times are far more
Speaker 1: serious than even Civil war days. He confided to a
Speaker 1: friend and retired army officer that was merely to decide
Speaker 1: whether we were going to be one nation or two,
Speaker 1: whereas the fight that is going on now in this
Speaker 1: country is going to decide whether we are going to
Speaker 1: be freemen or slaves. Just maybe the most someone can
Speaker 1: misunderstand the Civil War Actually that one was about slaves. Fred. Whoops, Ye, dude,
Speaker 1: this Fred, dude man not what's your vibe on him?
Speaker 1: So far? Well went downhill very fast. Yeah, you're on
Speaker 1: board with him at first. Yeah, I was like, okay, cool.
Speaker 1: You you're a scientist. You're figuring out what a way
Speaker 1: to tearing crude oil on the gasoline whatever. You're getting
Speaker 1: screwed over by the Wild Company. A lot of people
Speaker 1: are all right, on to my Boyfrida. He's not my boy.
Speaker 1: Well now he's he's he's no one's boy. Actually, because
Speaker 1: Fred Coke does not seem to have had a warm
Speaker 1: thought for anybody in the course of his life. Uh.
Speaker 1: He didn't marry a woman, Mary Robinson in nineteen thirty two.
Speaker 1: He was pretty brutal to her. Based on sort of
Speaker 1: the recollections that we have, I don't think what he
Speaker 1: did would have been considered spousal abuse in nineteen thirties,
Speaker 1: but I think we would consider it spousal abuse today. Uh.
Speaker 1: And did over times have change? Is not a hit
Speaker 1: in the thirties if it's to a woman, but now
Speaker 1: hit is a hit to a And I think he
Speaker 1: was more of the shouty emotionally abuse. So he was
Speaker 1: an emotionally okay, he physically abusive to his kids too,
Speaker 1: which were we'll get to yeah yeah. Uh. So Fred
Speaker 1: and Mary had four sons, Frederick, Charles, David, and William.
Speaker 1: David and William were twins. Uh. Mary had an active
Speaker 1: social life and was gone frequently. Fred was also always
Speaker 1: on business trips, so the kids were raised largely by
Speaker 1: an assortment of nanni's and help rather than their parents. Um.
Speaker 1: I wonder what kind of impact. You probably have a
Speaker 1: lot of abandonment issues and probably trust issues going on
Speaker 1: you think, so, Yeah, well, I don't know. I'm just
Speaker 1: going to read an unrelated passage from the book Tribe
Speaker 1: by Fame War correspondent Sebastian Younger that just happens to
Speaker 1: talk about what occurs when children are separated from their
Speaker 1: parents at a young age too often. Yeah, just unrelated
Speaker 1: passage to read us. The alienating effects of wealth and
Speaker 1: modernity on the human experience start virtually at birth and
Speaker 1: never let up. Infants and hunter gatherer societies are carried
Speaker 1: by their mothers as much as of the time, which
Speaker 1: roughly corresponds to carrying rates among other primates. Meanwhile, Younger
Speaker 1: notes over in America, quote during the nineteen seventies, mothers
Speaker 1: maintain skin to skin contact with babies as little as
Speaker 1: sixteen percent of the time, which is a level that
Speaker 1: traditional societies would probably consider a form of child abuse.
Speaker 1: So sixteen percent is what a normal kid in America
Speaker 1: is getting physical contact with their parents being raised. The
Speaker 1: Cokes are being raised by a nanny. Uh and dark
Speaker 1: money does not make this nanny sound like the cuddling kind.
Speaker 1: So I think these kids are spending pretty much all
Speaker 1: of their time isolated. Um. Quote the nannie's iron rule
Speaker 1: terrified the little boys. According to a family acquaintance, in
Speaker 1: addition to being overbearing, she was a fervent Nazi sympathizer
Speaker 1: who frequently touted Hitler's virtues. Dressed in a starch white
Speaker 1: uniform and pointed nurse's hat, she arrived with a stash
Speaker 1: of gruesome German children books, including the Victorian classic der
Speaker 1: Strue Peter, that featured sadistic consequences for misbehavior, ranging from
Speaker 1: cutting off one child's thumbs to burning another to death.
Speaker 1: The acquaintance recalled that the nurse had a commensurately harsh
Speaker 1: and dictatorial approach to child rearing. She enforced a rigid
Speaker 1: toilet training regiment, requiring the boys to produce morning ball
Speaker 1: movements precisely unscheduled or be force fed castor royal and
Speaker 1: subjected to enemas. So that's the first five or six
Speaker 1: years of the Koch brothers as his lives. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: didn't know there are four of them. That's when I
Speaker 1: take away from that whole thing. Yeah, the Cooke brothers
Speaker 1: that people famously talk about are two of them, Charles
Speaker 1: and David. The others were not nearly is involved in politics, Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's so sad. Yeah, it's a bummer. So it's I
Speaker 1: think important to get that background because we're gonna talk
Speaker 1: about a lot of terrible ship they've done. Uh. It's
Speaker 1: kind of hard to imagine anyone turning out without some
Speaker 1: weird quirks growing up in that circumstance, can't we say? Um? Yeah?
Speaker 1: So the Nazi sympathizer Fred Coke hired to raise his
Speaker 1: kids while he was busy doing business, and I capitalized business.
Speaker 1: It's big business for sure. Stayed around until about nineteen forty,
Speaker 1: when she got so excited about Germany's victory over France
Speaker 1: that she moved back home to be a bigger part
Speaker 1: of this whole Nazi thing. She said she wanted to
Speaker 1: celebrate with Hitler, who would dude, good party? I wouldn't
Speaker 1: because he couldn't. No, I wouldn't want a party with him. Yeah,
Speaker 1: on a seriously, on the record, I do not want
Speaker 1: a party with Hitler. I want a party with Stalin
Speaker 1: like he was a bad dude too. But the drinking
Speaker 1: bouts that you here described that the Russian high count
Speaker 1: sound sound like something I want to witness. I've never
Speaker 1: seen that, man, it was we have a whole episode
Speaker 1: about it. But they were. They were the drunkest people
Speaker 1: in history. Um. But no, Hitler not fun to party with.
Speaker 1: It doesn't sound like this lady was either. So when
Speaker 1: he was home, Fred Coke was a strict disciplinarian. Yeah. Sorry,
Speaker 1: I'm really riveted by the story. I'm like, looking at you,
Speaker 1: big do I uh so? Yeah. Fred Coke was a
Speaker 1: strict disciplinarian, and in the context of this podcast, disciplinarian
Speaker 1: means child abuser. Pretty much, he was a child abuser.
Speaker 1: He abused his kids. One family member recalls him ripping
Speaker 1: the branch off a tree and whipping the twins quote
Speaker 1: like dogs, because they stained the patio and not stained
Speaker 1: in the Yeah, but they spilled something, spilled something. Yeah. Uh.
Speaker 1: In summer, rather than let his kids play with neighbors,
Speaker 1: he made them dig holes and shovel manure. His biggest
Speaker 1: fear was that they turned out to be quote country
Speaker 1: club bums like most rich kids. Yeah. In his own book,
Speaker 1: Charles Coke wrote, quote, by instilling a work ethic in
Speaker 1: me at an early age, my father there did me
Speaker 1: a big favor, although it didn't seem like a favor
Speaker 1: back then. By the time I was eight, he made
Speaker 1: sure work occupied most of my spare time. Yeah, little hands.
Speaker 1: It's made me reconsider some of them, because, like I've
Speaker 1: known some frustrating people who grew up very wealthy and
Speaker 1: who didn't really have a realistic understanding of hard work
Speaker 1: or how difficult it is to have to like make
Speaker 1: rent and pay for your health care and ship. So
Speaker 1: a lot of me has always thought if these rich
Speaker 1: parents would instill in their kids some sort of respect
Speaker 1: for what it takes, maybe they would be better people.
Speaker 1: And this is proof that you can go away too
Speaker 1: far in the other direction. Um, eight year old shouldn't
Speaker 1: be working all the time. Holy small Yeah, yeah it's dark.
Speaker 1: I mean I had to do some of that growing up,
Speaker 1: but nothing too much. Guy grew up in Texas, so
Speaker 1: like same here Dallas mostly okay, cool in Dallas area, Okay,
Speaker 1: very cool. I'm from a little town. You know where
Speaker 1: Temple is if I've spent a lot of time in Temple. Yeah,
Speaker 1: from a small town outside of Okay cool. So a
Speaker 1: lot of summers really helping my grandpa on the farm. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And I spent a lot of time in Oklahoma as
Speaker 1: a little kid, and we had a farm, like it's
Speaker 1: good to have those experience, but not all the time,
Speaker 1: all the time you should. Yeah. So it seems like
Speaker 1: too far in the other, too much compensate. So yeah,
Speaker 1: children being forced to labor will become something of a
Speaker 1: theme later in Charles's life, and just put a pin
Speaker 1: in that. Um. So, the young Coke boys spent a
Speaker 1: lot of time boxing each other. This is one of
Speaker 1: the few non work activities that their father encouraged. Charles
Speaker 1: usually won these matches, but once his younger brother Bill
Speaker 1: was able to beat him, and Charles stopped boxing forever.
Speaker 1: It's like yeah. Um. Charles had a somewhat adversarial relationship
Speaker 1: with his oldest brother Frederick, who was more sensitive than
Speaker 1: the other boys. Uh. He also didn't get along with Bill.
Speaker 1: David Coke seems to be basically the only person Charles
Speaker 1: Coke ever sort of liked. Um. Yeah, even Charles and
Speaker 1: David are again the Coke brother Yeah. So. In the
Speaker 1: grand tradition of rich families, Charles Coke was sent away
Speaker 1: from home when he was eleven to the strictest school possible,
Speaker 1: mainly because his mother was worried of what he might
Speaker 1: do to his brother Bill if he stayed at home. Um.
Speaker 1: He was shifted around several schools, including a public school,
Speaker 1: but always kept getting kicked out due to bad behavior.
Speaker 1: He finally wound up in a military academy, where he
Speaker 1: did well until he was expelled for drinking on a
Speaker 1: train alcohol I assume unless trains were Yeah, Charles behavior
Speaker 1: was met with correspondingly severe punishments from his father. Eventually,
Speaker 1: the discipline seemed to take hold and Charles started to
Speaker 1: do better at school. UM. So we will be getting
Speaker 1: into the rest of Charles Coke's adolescent gears uh, and
Speaker 1: his adulthood battles with some of his other brothers, including
Speaker 1: his his brother Freddie, who just take a guess as
Speaker 1: to what sensitive means in the parlance of Yeah, that
Speaker 1: was the theory at list was the idea that the
Speaker 1: brothers had. So we'll be getting into all of that
Speaker 1: and uh, as well as how Charles Coke wound up
Speaker 1: getting some people killed through regulatory factory, and a bunch
Speaker 1: of other fun stuff, including some quotations from the Libertarian
Speaker 1: Reader and some articles Charles wrote for that. So a
Speaker 1: lot of fun stuff coming up, can't wait. But before
Speaker 1: we get into that, it's time for some ads that
Speaker 1: actually paid us money. I love it. I love ads
Speaker 1: as much as I love the cheesy crunch of a
Speaker 1: nacho flavored Dorito's chip, which I'm about to eat right now.
Speaker 1: I love nacho cheese, Oh my god. My favorite is
Speaker 1: with the lingering taste in the tongue and my fingers
Speaker 1: the best part. I'd love to do that right before
Speaker 1: I meet people, and then I still have like a
Speaker 1: little bit of chip in my teeth, my back teeth.
Speaker 1: I love it. It's like it's a little bit of
Speaker 1: extra confidence going on. I'm always confident when I have
Speaker 1: my Dorrito's nacho cheese corn chips. It's like there's a
Speaker 1: party in my mouth and Hitler is not invited. Maybe
Speaker 1: Stalin us not for me. All right, here's some ads
Speaker 1: and we're back. Uh Now. When we last started off,
Speaker 1: we talked about Fred Coke, the family patriarch, how he
Speaker 1: built the family fortune by working with the Soviet Union
Speaker 1: and the Nazis. We talked some about his parenting strategies
Speaker 1: and the Coke Boys nanny. Uh and we've just gotten
Speaker 1: through Charles Coke's kind of troubled time in school. You know,
Speaker 1: he spent a lot of time getting kicked out of
Speaker 1: different educational institutions for being too rowdy. Um now. A
Speaker 1: major source for the book Dark Money and for this
Speaker 1: podcast as a result, was an unpublished report about Charles
Speaker 1: Coke written by a professor named Clayton Coppin. Coppin had
Speaker 1: been first hired by Coke Industries to write it in
Speaker 1: depth history of the corporation, and he gets access to
Speaker 1: a lot of internal family documents. Yeah. He was next
Speaker 1: hired by Bill Coke to basically write an opposition research
Speaker 1: piece on Charles Coke because the Cooke brothers paid each other.
Speaker 1: I didn't know that. Yeah, yeah, we'll be getting into that.
Speaker 1: Jew Bill yeah hired him and said, dude, I know
Speaker 1: you've been digging around our family history. We got all
Speaker 1: ourselves on the website. That's pretty cool. By the way,
Speaker 1: I want you to here's everything I got on my brother.
Speaker 1: Let me guess this dude's dead now, isn't he? Is
Speaker 1: this dude? Did no? No Coppins alive? Yeah? Okay barely? Yeah, okay,
Speaker 1: tell me more or at least as far as I know,
Speaker 1: Coppins alive anyway. The report that he wrote was like
Speaker 1: a book link report. It's unpublished, but mayor the journalist wrote,
Speaker 1: Doc Money got a copy of it, and she quotes
Speaker 1: from it liberally. So here's how Coppin's report describes Charles
Speaker 1: Coke's late adolescence. Quote Charles spent little of the next
Speaker 1: fifteen years at home, only coming there for an occasional holiday.
Speaker 1: When he finally did come back, the first thing Charles
Speaker 1: did when he came home on vacation was beat up Bill.
Speaker 1: So how he's a bit of a dick to his
Speaker 1: brothers Um, yeah, I'm off the train, your motherfucker. So
Speaker 1: in nineteen fifty eight, Fred Coke became one of the
Speaker 1: founding members of the John Birch Society. About John Birch,
Speaker 1: I don't know bout Oh it's fun. So John burt
Speaker 1: Society was a far right wing conspiracy theory focused society.
Speaker 1: They would be kind of the nineteen fifties equivalent of
Speaker 1: a group like Info Wars. Ok. Yeah, So the society's
Speaker 1: goal was to stop the spread of communism in America
Speaker 1: and push back against the efforts of secret communists hiding
Speaker 1: in the American government. Oh they did. They start that
Speaker 1: witch hunt in the Hollywood. They were a big part
Speaker 1: of that. But they went a lot further than McCarthy did,
Speaker 1: because the secret Communists they were going after. We're guys
Speaker 1: like President Dwight D. Eisenhower. So Eisenhower was a lefty
Speaker 1: by according to the John Birch Society. Yeah, the Dwight
Speaker 1: Eisenhower who had the leader of the Congo assassinated for
Speaker 1: being a leftist sympathizer. That Dwight Eisenhower is a conist.
Speaker 1: Sometimes when you are that deeton in too, he's deep cover,
Speaker 1: deep cover, you have to do things to make it
Speaker 1: look like you're not. Yes. Sometime I get it. Sometimes
Speaker 1: you have to overthrow three or four democratically left and
Speaker 1: leftist regimes in order to further the broader goals of communism.
Speaker 1: Is that what you're saying yes because you want to
Speaker 1: throw the people that are on your trail off your
Speaker 1: trail is possible. Hitler was a secret I'm gonna shut
Speaker 1: you down. You should uh So. The whole John Burt
Speaker 1: Society was the brainchild of Robert Welch of the John
Speaker 1: Burt Society demanded the US retire from the United Nations
Speaker 1: UH and ordered flyers circulated in Dallas, Texas. The day
Speaker 1: before the arrival of President Kennedy The flyers stated that
Speaker 1: Kennedy was wanted for treason and that quote, he is
Speaker 1: turning the sovereignty of the US over to the communist
Speaker 1: controlled United Nations. So this has been going on for
Speaker 1: a long This has been going on for a long time.
Speaker 1: All of this was more or less in lined with
Speaker 1: the beliefs of Fred Coke, a man who, in publications
Speaker 1: he wrote for the John Birt Society stated, quote, the
Speaker 1: colored man looms large in the Communist plan to take
Speaker 1: over America. Fred suspected the Welfare was a conspiracy to
Speaker 1: fill American cities with black people, who would then carry
Speaker 1: out a race war to exterminate white people. This is
Speaker 1: where Fred Coke's mind is, uh Now. The Kennedy assassination
Speaker 1: was not great for the reputations of the members of
Speaker 1: the John Birch Society or for Robert Welch. I don't
Speaker 1: know about this, but maybe did they do it? That's
Speaker 1: a myth. I haven't heard of this myth, but I'll
Speaker 1: have to dig into it. If you dig into myths
Speaker 1: around the assassination of Kennedy, the John Birch Society regularly
Speaker 1: comes up. I guess I haven't been google and not
Speaker 1: hard Yeah, they were just a big thing in far
Speaker 1: right circles back in the fifties and sixties. Um So,
Speaker 1: after the Kennedy assassination, obviously, mainstream conservatives denounced the John
Speaker 1: Birch Society and Robert Welch is crazy uh and claimed
Speaker 1: the society was a little more than a collection of
Speaker 1: conspiracy theorists. Charles Coke joined the John Birch Society to
Speaker 1: impress his father, but he actually hated the John Society
Speaker 1: because he thought all this conspiracy ship was nuts. He was,
Speaker 1: who did this, Charles Coke, Yeah, Well, he really wanted
Speaker 1: his father. He really wanted his dad's approval because he
Speaker 1: did not like the John Bird Society. Um he was
Speaker 1: impressed by their organization and their fundraising prowess because they
Speaker 1: raised a lot of money and they had a really good,
Speaker 1: secret sort of political organization going. He thought all the
Speaker 1: conspiracy bullshit got in the way of what the society
Speaker 1: should be doing, which was actually conspiring to destroy the
Speaker 1: New Deal and most of the American government. Um So,
Speaker 1: that was his issue with the John Burt Society. It's
Speaker 1: too much time on conspiracy theory nonsense, not enough time
Speaker 1: dismantling the government. Um So in nineteen sixty one, when
Speaker 1: Charles was twenty six, his father's health began to fail,
Speaker 1: and Charles went back home to Wichita to help run
Speaker 1: the company. Uh he'd been working as a consultant in Boston. Um,
Speaker 1: and he hadn't been back in Kansas long when he
Speaker 1: had his Doc Brown hitting his head on a toilet
Speaker 1: and inventing the flex capacitor. Kind of moment um. Here's
Speaker 1: how the Wall Street Journal described it in a fawning
Speaker 1: nine article. Quote. One day in nineteen sixty two, Charles,
Speaker 1: a newly minted m T engineer, pulled down a book
Speaker 1: on the Austrian school of economics, which describes free economies
Speaker 1: as systems of spontaneous, unplanned order. I spent the next
Speaker 1: two years almost like a hermit, surrounded by books, he says. So,
Speaker 1: Charles Coke starts running a company for the first time
Speaker 1: and falls in love with libertarian economic theory and sort
Speaker 1: of consumes him and for the next couple of years
Speaker 1: he's just reading. Basically, he becomes convinced that in essence,
Speaker 1: his company would thrive it was run on free market principles. Uh.
Speaker 1: So he basically creates a theory for how to manage
Speaker 1: a company called market based management UM quote. The free market,
Speaker 1: best of all, agglomerates local interactions into a whole vastly
Speaker 1: exceeding the sum of its parts, a phenomenon that Mr.
Speaker 1: Coke is especially keen to copy. So his idea to
Speaker 1: copy this seems to have been to have different divisions
Speaker 1: within his company compete with each other. So if, like,
Speaker 1: you need some of your employees to be trained, right,
Speaker 1: normally there'd be a chunk of the company that's responsible
Speaker 1: for training them. Well, in Charles Coke's company, that chunk
Speaker 1: of the company exists, but they have to bid with
Speaker 1: outside companies that do training in order to like determine
Speaker 1: who's going to get to train your employees. So basically
Speaker 1: every business unit within the company is competing with rather
Speaker 1: business unit in the company rather than working together. And
Speaker 1: the goal was that this will hopefully keep costs down
Speaker 1: and lead to more innovation. It sounds exhausting to me,
Speaker 1: but but this is the idea that he comes up with,
Speaker 1: like during this this period, this is his big like
Speaker 1: stroke of brilliance um And then also in the mid
Speaker 1: nineteen sixties, so that mid nineteen sixties is when he
Speaker 1: comes up with this idea for market based management. And
Speaker 1: it's also when he comes to believe that his brother
Speaker 1: Freddie is gay. Uh. He and a friend even break
Speaker 1: into Freddy's apartment to try and find incriminating evidence to
Speaker 1: this effect. Eventually, Charles organized his two other brothers into
Speaker 1: a coalition against Freddie. This all culminated in a boardroom confrontation,
Speaker 1: with Freddie on one side and Bill, David, and Charles
Speaker 1: on the other. Now Charles told Freddie his behavior was
Speaker 1: inappropriate and warned that if their dad found out, it
Speaker 1: might kill him, but not before he disinherited Frederick. Now.
Speaker 1: At some point in this ugly mess, Bill Coke apparently
Speaker 1: found his sense of basic human decency and started defending
Speaker 1: his brother uh and later apologized for being a part
Speaker 1: of it in the first place. This infuriated else. It's
Speaker 1: hard to say exactly what happened as a result of
Speaker 1: all this, but Freddie did wind up taking a much
Speaker 1: larger chunk of his inheritance in cash upfront, rather than
Speaker 1: getting as big a chunk of the company that he
Speaker 1: and his brothers all inherited. It's also worth noting that
Speaker 1: that Frederick Coke says that the rumors of him being
Speaker 1: gay are untrue and that his brothers were wrong about this.
Speaker 1: I don't know what the actual case was. Um. He
Speaker 1: was definitely less focused on business and more of an
Speaker 1: artist and more interested in in that sort of world.
Speaker 1: So it may have just been that that he was
Speaker 1: a kid in the sixties who cared more about art
Speaker 1: than running a company, and that's why his brothers treated
Speaker 1: him like ship. I don't know, Um, But he never
Speaker 1: started a multibillion dollar fundraising enterprise to essentially push America
Speaker 1: further to the right. So as far as I got
Speaker 1: nothing against Frederick Coke, um, but he got a little
Speaker 1: bit sucked over by his brothers in here and probably was.
Speaker 1: And it seems like that's mainly the case, um, And
Speaker 1: Bill and Frederick are sort of the good Coke brothers.
Speaker 1: Frederick kind of went off on his own and d
Speaker 1: of lived on his own and didn't have much to
Speaker 1: do with the family. Bill started a separate company and
Speaker 1: dedicated millions of dollars to fucking over his brother Charles,
Speaker 1: and then Charles and David are the Coke brothers that
Speaker 1: we all know today. Um. So this is kind of
Speaker 1: where that schism happens, right, Um. So fred Coke conspiracy
Speaker 1: theorist and honorary Nazi finally crapped out of life in
Speaker 1: November of nineteen sixty seven, aged nineteen sixty seven. So
Speaker 1: at least shitty people don't always live to be fucking ninety. Um.
Speaker 1: That's that's an upbeat aspect of that story. When Fred died,
Speaker 1: his kids inherited a bunch of money and shares in
Speaker 1: his company. Like most rich people, Fred Coke wanted to
Speaker 1: give as little of his estate as possible to the government.
Speaker 1: He did this by creating a charitable lead trust for
Speaker 1: some reason that I have to exsume is indistinguishable from voodoo.
Speaker 1: This allowed him to hand most of his money to
Speaker 1: his kids without paying inheritance taxes. The only sticking point
Speaker 1: was that for twenty years, his sons had to take
Speaker 1: all the interest earned by the trust and donated to
Speaker 1: charity here's dark money quote to maximize their self interest.
Speaker 1: In other words, the coke As were compelled to be charitable.
Speaker 1: Tax avoidance was thus the original impetus for the Koch
Speaker 1: brothers extraordinary philanthropy is David Coke later explained, So for
Speaker 1: twenty years I had to give away all that income
Speaker 1: and I sort of got into it, so the Koch
Speaker 1: Brothers will become major philanthropists, funding like museums as well
Speaker 1: as far right politics and conservative think tanks. UM. In nineteen,
Speaker 1: the year after his father's death, Charles Cooke left the
Speaker 1: John Birch Society over their support of the Vietnam War. Um.
Speaker 1: He has been consistently an anti war guy his whole life. Uh.
Speaker 1: He discarded the conspiracy riddled far right nonsense of his
Speaker 1: father for the political theories of Robert Lefev. Now. Lefev
Speaker 1: was a libertarian philosopher who supported the abolishment of the state.
Speaker 1: Because of this, some people call him an anarchist, which
Speaker 1: is inaccurate. Um. See, when you're actually talking about anarchists
Speaker 1: political theory, not just the term anarchy is a sim
Speaker 1: for no rules, man and stuff scroll on the moment
Speaker 1: of skateboards, but the actual ideology with an extensive philosophical history.
Speaker 1: You can't get far without discussioning the concept of mutual aid.
Speaker 1: Anarchists do seek the abolition of the state, but it's
Speaker 1: not an everyone for himself ideology. I'm quoting here from
Speaker 1: a pamphlet you can find online called What the Fund
Speaker 1: Is Mutual Aid. Quote through mutual aid, anarchism take shape
Speaker 1: as a practice and care, exchanging resources and solidarity, information support,
Speaker 1: even comfort, care and understanding. People give what they can
Speaker 1: and get what they need. When a group comes together
Speaker 1: to push for a change, When social outsiders come together
Speaker 1: to share or explore ideas and new ways of living,
Speaker 1: these are all forms of mutual aid. In other words,
Speaker 1: mutual aid is what happens when a group of people
Speaker 1: embrace their dependence on each other and turn it into
Speaker 1: a strength. This is exactly the opposite of what Robert
Speaker 1: Lefev preached. Even he didn't like being called an anarchist,
Speaker 1: he preferred to define himself as an autarchist. Which that
Speaker 1: seems familiar, doesn't it. Yeah? Uh so. My only issue
Speaker 1: with Dark Money, which I think is a deeply important book,
Speaker 1: is that it declares Coke and his fellow travelers to
Speaker 1: be anarchists. They are not. They seek complete independence from
Speaker 1: other people because their wealth allows them to believe that
Speaker 1: is possible. Actual anarchists political theory is literally the opposite
Speaker 1: of autarchy. Um, that was just a layman's terms. I
Speaker 1: appreciate it. Got a little loss. I don't know if
Speaker 1: you saw my Sorry, I got off on a little
Speaker 1: bit of a rant there um. So Charles Cooke developed
Speaker 1: brain Bonner for the ideas of Robert Lefev. Yeah, philosopher,
Speaker 1: and Robert Lefev, I should note, was not just a philosopher.
Speaker 1: He committed mail fraud a number of times. He was
Speaker 1: an FBI informant during McCarthy's purge of Hollywood. He also
Speaker 1: orchestrated a movement to purge the Girl Scouts of communists.
Speaker 1: He established the Freedom School in nineteen fifty seven. According
Speaker 1: to the Freedom School and it's curriculum, the Gilded Age
Speaker 1: was basically the best time ever in American history in
Speaker 1: businessmen we know today as Robert Baron's were heroes. The
Speaker 1: Freedom School believed that the poor should be helped only
Speaker 1: by charity, that the Civil War had been a terrible mistake,
Speaker 1: not because of the Confederacy support of slavery, but because
Speaker 1: the Union had conscripted people, and that was a worse
Speaker 1: thing than slavery. I should note that the Freedom School
Speaker 1: did not support Confederate style slavery. The Freedom School actually
Speaker 1: supported a totally different type of slavery. They wanted free
Speaker 1: people to be able to sell themselves into slavery what. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm like pulling a handbrake on a convertible during a
Speaker 1: fish tail right now, excuse me. Yeah, they're kind of nuts. Hey, dude,
Speaker 1: how much if you pay me? But then I can
Speaker 1: use that money. Yeah, it's pretty nuts, um. And it's
Speaker 1: one of those Like obviously, there's a lot of different
Speaker 1: strains of libertarian thought, and I don't think most libertarians,
Speaker 1: at least that I've met, do not support letting people
Speaker 1: sell themselves into slavery. But that is a chunk of
Speaker 1: the movement, and it is the chunk of the movement
Speaker 1: that Charles Coke starts out in. So he is very
Speaker 1: drawn to the ideas of these guys. Uh. He forces
Speaker 1: his brothers to attend freedom school seminars, which they mostly
Speaker 1: seemed to not enjoy. I guess they weren't. This is
Speaker 1: an asshole. It's terrible. This guy sucks, Like he forced
Speaker 1: his bro there's his brother. Man, this guy sucks, and
Speaker 1: he's you know, he's the middle kid. But Freddie is
Speaker 1: not a very forceful personality, so I think he kind
Speaker 1: of takes on the dominant role with his brothers for
Speaker 1: a lot of the time. And yeah, he's just so
Speaker 1: angry he's really angry and he's really obsessed with control. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I have some weird compassion for him, but a lot
Speaker 1: of it is like, yeah, it's hard not to have
Speaker 1: a little bit because clearly nobody would want his childhood.
Speaker 1: It sounds terrible. But also his brothers didn't all grow
Speaker 1: up to be like this, So some of this is
Speaker 1: just Charles Cooke choosing to be yeah, a piece of crap.
Speaker 1: Uh So his brothers mostly did not like the Freedom
Speaker 1: School because I think they're mostly not insane. Frederick thought
Speaker 1: Lefev was a con man and said this, and Charles
Speaker 1: threatened to deck him for saying So would you say
Speaker 1: about this guy, He's gonna tell me why slavery is
Speaker 1: okay if people choose it for themselves. Now, in nineteen
Speaker 1: sixty six, Charles became one of the chief funders of
Speaker 1: the Freedom School um because he just thought all these
Speaker 1: guys needed was a little bit more money to really
Speaker 1: really press their ideas home to American society. The country
Speaker 1: was ready for this. Yeah. In the nineteen nineties, during
Speaker 1: a speech, he claimed his life at the all white prosegregationists. Also,
Speaker 1: the school was all white and prosegregationists. They weren't all
Speaker 1: white as a rule, but Lafev said that he didn't
Speaker 1: think black people would be comfortable there because most of
Speaker 1: his students were segregationists. Okay, I guess that's honest. Like, okay,
Speaker 1: I don't really know what else to say about that.
Speaker 1: That makes me feel sick. Yeah, yeah, it's terrible. Um So.
Speaker 1: In the nineteen nineties, Charles gave a speech where he
Speaker 1: said that the Freedom School is quote where I began
Speaker 1: developing a passionate commitment to liberty as the form of
Speaker 1: social organization most in harmony with reality and man's nature,
Speaker 1: like the liberty to sell yourself into slavery. I know
Speaker 1: I keep pushing on that point, but it really like
Speaker 1: where is your head where that's an issue for you.
Speaker 1: We're like you look at the world and all of
Speaker 1: the problems and are like, God, it's ashamed people can't
Speaker 1: sell themselves as a slavery. It sounds like he found
Speaker 1: someone or a group of people that accepted him, and
Speaker 1: he's probably was like, Hey, accept me, and I'm a
Speaker 1: big deal. I'm a big dog. Yeah. I guess that's
Speaker 1: got to be it, because they're like part of it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't know, I'm trying to be nice to him
Speaker 1: in a in a like, Okay, I think about his childhood.
Speaker 1: He's sucked up, he's got all these bad things, and
Speaker 1: then here's this school of thought that's like, oh, my
Speaker 1: gun man, and I see you're kind of vulnerable in
Speaker 1: a funked up kind of way, you know what I mean. Well,
Speaker 1: I think maybe it ties in a little bit too,
Speaker 1: because like he had joined the John Birch Society because
Speaker 1: his dad was a big part of that, and he
Speaker 1: clearly didn't feel at home there, but he clearly I
Speaker 1: think he wanted something like that, and maybe his thought
Speaker 1: was like, these guys can be these are his proud boys. Yeah, exactly. So,
Speaker 1: as the nineteen seventies kickoff, the Coke brothers minus Freddie
Speaker 1: are in charge of the company, which they rename Coke
Speaker 1: Industries from Winkler Coke. Uh. Charles soon becomes the real power.
Speaker 1: He's working six days a week, ten hours a day
Speaker 1: and sinks himself so deeply into his work that he
Speaker 1: has to propose to his wife Liz over the phone
Speaker 1: while looking through his schedule to see when he can
Speaker 1: pencil the wedding in which I don't know if that's
Speaker 1: literally true. When you read stories about rich guys that
Speaker 1: they write about themselves, you'll usually run into something like this.
Speaker 1: Paul Manafort says the same thing about like how his
Speaker 1: first daughter was conceived in between conference calls, Like I
Speaker 1: think it's a thing rich guys brag about, like how
Speaker 1: busy they are that they didn't like, Oh yeah, we
Speaker 1: had to fit the wedding and in between all these
Speaker 1: different acquisition meetings and stuff. I think they're proud of
Speaker 1: this ship. Like how little work life balance they have
Speaker 1: doesn't seem like a healthy thing, but super gross. You
Speaker 1: know it's not gross. What products and services that support
Speaker 1: this podcast and or program? Tell me some more? You
Speaker 1: know what, I'll do better than tell you some more.
Speaker 1: I will pause and wait for us to play some
Speaker 1: prerecorded ads. I love prerecorded ads. Oh they're the best,
Speaker 1: and we're back, um boy, those were some great products
Speaker 1: and or services. So during the nineteen seventies, the Coke
Speaker 1: Boys are all sort of working at the company. They
Speaker 1: take it over from their dead dad. Charles is running
Speaker 1: things um and he increasingly takes full control of the operation.
Speaker 1: In a three, Charles and his brother David arrange a
Speaker 1: one point one billion dollar buy out for their brothers
Speaker 1: shares of the company. Uh, this leaves them in control
Speaker 1: of more than of Coke Industry stock. Now, while Charles
Speaker 1: and David are equal on paper, insiders report that Charles
Speaker 1: is the company. Um. Now, I feel like this is
Speaker 1: a good place to talk about what kind of man
Speaker 1: Charles is now that he is a man and not
Speaker 1: just a kid. Yeah, not a boy, not yet. Yeah,
Speaker 1: now he's a man. Now he's a man, and this
Speaker 1: is the kind of man he is, because I think
Speaker 1: a great way to know someone best because a lot
Speaker 1: of people are shitty to their siblings. Right, you'd be
Speaker 1: a good person and terrible to your brother or sister.
Speaker 1: It's just life. I think a good way to know
Speaker 1: what kind of a human being someone is how they
Speaker 1: treat service industry personnel. H So I find this quote
Speaker 1: from Dark Money to be rather revealing quote. A former
Speaker 1: doorman described Coke as the cheapest person in the building.
Speaker 1: We would load up his trucks two vans, usually every
Speaker 1: weekend for the Hampton's in and out, in and out,
Speaker 1: heavy bags. We would never get a tip from Mr Coke.
Speaker 1: We would never get a smile from Mr Coke for Christmas,
Speaker 1: which the Doorman had anticipated would make up for the
Speaker 1: years travails. Coke merely gave him a fifty dollar check
Speaker 1: when the documentary aired. This was a documentary where this
Speaker 1: stuff about how he treated these people came out. When
Speaker 1: the documentary aired on public broadcasting service in two thousand twelve,
Speaker 1: David Coke was so incensed he resigned from the board
Speaker 1: of New York's public television station w n ET, reneging
Speaker 1: on a promise to make a major donation. A spokeswoman
Speaker 1: at Coke Industries declined to comment on whether the documentary
Speaker 1: was his reason for punishing the station, but Coke bluntly
Speaker 1: told one friend about the film, it's going to cost
Speaker 1: them ten million. Another family friend is quoted as saying,
Speaker 1: they move in a world with people like them or
Speaker 1: who want to be. They know no poor people at all.
Speaker 1: They're not the kind of people who feel obligated to
Speaker 1: get to know the help. So this is Charles and
Speaker 1: David Coke. Uh. Now, under Charles's rule, Coke Industries expanded
Speaker 1: from a company worth hundreds of millions to a company
Speaker 1: worth tens of billions, the largest privately owned company in
Speaker 1: the world right now. In the nineteen seventies, and eighties.
Speaker 1: Their business was mostly oil and gas refining. The center
Speaker 1: of it all was the Pine Bind refinery, which takes
Speaker 1: hundreds of thousands of gallons of filthy Canadian crude oil
Speaker 1: from the Tar Sans and turns it into usable gas.
Speaker 1: This process is incredibly wasteful and produces an enormous amount
Speaker 1: of pollution, but it's also super profitable because you're buying
Speaker 1: garbage oil from Canada and turning it into premo ship.
Speaker 1: So Charles Coke is not just an oil man. He's
Speaker 1: decided to be like the dirtiest possible version of an
Speaker 1: oil man UM and he does not give one funk
Speaker 1: about regulations and rules meant to minimize the environmental harm
Speaker 1: of his company or do bullshit like protect workers from
Speaker 1: danger and horrific disease UM. Starting in the nineteen seventies, OSHA,
Speaker 1: the organization dedicated to stopping companies from killing their workers UH,
Speaker 1: the Comtattional Health and Safety Administration put in place new
Speaker 1: regulations that required companies to give annual blood tests to
Speaker 1: workers who spent a lot of time around benzene UH.
Speaker 1: They're also required to warn these employees if the tests
Speaker 1: show any abnormalities. So that the employees can receive medical
Speaker 1: treatment before they get full on blood cancer or whatever. Right,
Speaker 1: Coke Refining Company offered these tests, but they didn't do
Speaker 1: such a good job about letting employees know when they
Speaker 1: had a regular results. Sometimes they just wouldn't tell them.
Speaker 1: So Donald Carlson, a dedicated employee with decades in the job,
Speaker 1: was not informed within his results showed abnormal blood cell
Speaker 1: counts in nineteen nine. He wasn't warned about this until
Speaker 1: nineteen when he started to get well, because you want
Speaker 1: to get those extra couple of years out of him. Right,
Speaker 1: this is disgusting. It's pretty bad. It's pretty bad. These
Speaker 1: guys are disgusting. Yeah, they're really terrible. Um Now, Donald
Speaker 1: continued to work after he got sick. Uh. So he
Speaker 1: was doing his job while receiving massive frequent blood transfusions.
Speaker 1: He loved his job. His job was like scrubbing out
Speaker 1: like the his cleaning tanks from refinery and stuff. Like
Speaker 1: he was doing dirty work. But he was just a
Speaker 1: working class guy. He wanted to do his job and
Speaker 1: take care of his family. He was like he took
Speaker 1: pride in it. He was your the best case scenario
Speaker 1: if you're like a big capitalist boss. He was your
Speaker 1: best case scenario of an employee. But in nineteen six
Speaker 1: he got too sick to work anymore. He was immediately
Speaker 1: fired and given six months severance pay, which almost sounds
Speaker 1: generous given the Koch brothers being the Koch brothers, But
Speaker 1: it turns out this was just his accumulated sick pay
Speaker 1: leave that they were legally required to pay out um.
Speaker 1: They gave him nothing that they weren't required to give
Speaker 1: him now. Carlson filed for workman's comp which seems like
Speaker 1: a job related illness getting blood poisoning from horrific benzine exposure,
Speaker 1: but Coke Refining refused. They weren't about to pay his
Speaker 1: medical bills or give benefits to his wife and daughter.
Speaker 1: They denied that his illness had anything to do with
Speaker 1: the fact that he had been covered in poisoned for years.
Speaker 1: He died in leaving his family destitute. His wife continued
Speaker 1: to fight the company for some restitution. They eventually settled
Speaker 1: with her for an undisclosed and out now. During my
Speaker 1: research for this, I found an article on benzing exposure
Speaker 1: from the Center for Public Integrity. It had Facebook comments enabled,
Speaker 1: and one of the commenters on the article was a
Speaker 1: woman named Mary Arnisson. Now Mary is a preventative medicine
Speaker 1: physician who testified against Coke Industries during the Carlson case.
Speaker 1: So she wrote in the comments to this article about
Speaker 1: her experience testifying against Coke Industries in this blood poison case. Quote.
Speaker 1: I was shocked by the behavior of Coke's hired gun
Speaker 1: hematologist who concealed the blood monitoring results that showed his
Speaker 1: worsening anemia, and by that doctor's blaming cigarette smoking much
Speaker 1: lower benzing exposure than waiting through spilled gasoline for his
Speaker 1: eventual development of leukemia. When it became obvious that I
Speaker 1: was on my way to testify against Coke, they withdrew
Speaker 1: their objection to his widow's claim for work comp benefits
Speaker 1: and payment of his medical bills. I still see. I
Speaker 1: hate Coke. So basically, up until they were forced to
Speaker 1: by the courts, they were lying and saying the fact
Speaker 1: that this guy had smoked cigarettes is why he got leukemia.
Speaker 1: The fact that he was literally almost bathing and benzing
Speaker 1: very heavy. Yeah, so they're not they're not. They kind
Speaker 1: of started. They were definitely in on that trend that
Speaker 1: a lot of big companies follow today they were pioneers.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, these boys coach boys, pioneer boys. Yeah yeah.
Speaker 1: Coke boys are on the cutting edge of sucking over
Speaker 1: their workers and letting hazardous chemical exposure kill people. Um,
Speaker 1: they might be the Michael Jordan's of hazardous chemical exposures. Yes,
Speaker 1: go maybe the Scottie Pippen p um so. Oh you're
Speaker 1: from Texas to so this will be fun. Coke Industries
Speaker 1: also owned a big refinery in Corpus Christie, Texas. Now,
Speaker 1: how would you describe sort of the attitude towards Corpus
Speaker 1: Christie within Texas. Corpus Christie is like your spring bake
Speaker 1: kind of vacation. Yeah. That in Galveston, Mustang Island. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I went once. You know. It's like all the high
Speaker 1: school kids like corpett Yeah, and they're they're okay. It's
Speaker 1: an okay place. The water is kind of gross compared
Speaker 1: to like Hawaii or the West Coast. Gross Hawaii would
Speaker 1: not be a bad way to describe its gross. Hawaii. Um,
Speaker 1: My brother is actually a tankerman on ships and he
Speaker 1: goes out and I'm always worried about because he's right
Speaker 1: in the thick of that. Yeah, but I'm always kind
Speaker 1: of worried about like chemical exposure. Yeah, him, Yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean that seems totally reasonable. There's a lot of refining
Speaker 1: and a lot of gross stuff going on. For sure,
Speaker 1: would not want to swim in that water, And looking back,
Speaker 1: I'm like, why would you go? Why did my parents
Speaker 1: let me swim in that day? It's just poison Galveston too, Yeah,
Speaker 1: you know. Anyways, Yeah, no, absolutely, and the Koke Brothers
Speaker 1: are a big part of why it is that way. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's great, it's great. Um. Yeah. So they had a
Speaker 1: big refiner in Corpus Christie that was quote hemorrhaging benzene
Speaker 1: into the air, which is a great thing to do
Speaker 1: with benzene is hemorrhage. Regulation required them to reduce emissions,
Speaker 1: so they just lied about how bad the emissions were
Speaker 1: when they filed their reports with the Texas National Resource
Speaker 1: Conservation Commission, which is fun. Yeah, they said they were
Speaker 1: putting out less poison than they were and assumed it'd
Speaker 1: be fine. So a lawyer within the company, within Coke Industries,
Speaker 1: actually called them out for lying to the government and
Speaker 1: was like, we can't defend this in the court. This
Speaker 1: is just fraud. So Coke Industry sent in one of
Speaker 1: their own people to actually figure out how much the
Speaker 1: factory was polluting over the limit. This report revealed horrific
Speaker 1: levels of ben zeene. Rather than report this, Coke Industry
Speaker 1: has just decided to lie again and say their emissions
Speaker 1: were one forty nine of what their own people had found.
Speaker 1: So they're not just lying by a little that they
Speaker 1: are holy ship Like I said that the Scottie Pippen
Speaker 1: of poison. Um well, I said, Michael Jordan's I don't know,
Speaker 1: they're all about it. That's a half point Sam Dunk show.
Speaker 1: Assume that's all above board and accurate. Yeah, the employee
Speaker 1: who had done the research wind up blowing the whistle
Speaker 1: and in two thousand Coke Industries was indicted on ninety
Speaker 1: seven accounts of being shady as during the trial it
Speaker 1: was revealed that just refitting the refinery to make it
Speaker 1: put out the legal amount of missions would have cost
Speaker 1: seven million dollars, which seems expensive. But that's not no, no,
Speaker 1: it's not it's not. Wow. Yeah, So this is they
Speaker 1: were willing to lie and put out huge amounts of
Speaker 1: poison rather than spend seven million dollars on a refinery
Speaker 1: that made a hundred and seventy six million in annual profits.
Speaker 1: So it's not a big drop in the bucket, you know,
Speaker 1: it's not even a drop in the bucket. No, I
Speaker 1: found a quarter outside. Yeah, that's finding a quarter outside. Yeah,
Speaker 1: or losing a quarter. Yeah, you're like, oh, man, a quarter,
Speaker 1: that's laundry. But they are like, what's laundry? You know? Yeah? Yeah,
Speaker 1: they burned their clothing after where Yeah. Uh So when
Speaker 1: everything shook out, they wound up paying about ten million
Speaker 1: in fees and another ten million to make Corpus Christie
Speaker 1: a little bit cleaner. Uh So, on the surface, it
Speaker 1: doesn't seem to make a lot of economic sense what
Speaker 1: they're doing. Seven million dollars because they had to wind
Speaker 1: up doing the refitting anyway, so they paid seven million
Speaker 1: dollars to comply with the missions requirement. Uh and then
Speaker 1: another twenty million dollars in fines, which means they spent
Speaker 1: four or five times more than what the repairs would
Speaker 1: have cost because they decided to break the law. So
Speaker 1: it might seem, when you look at it that way,
Speaker 1: that this was just a bad gamble by Charles Coke,
Speaker 1: But Charles Coke doesn't make bad gambles. And he doesn't
Speaker 1: flout regulations to save money. He does so because ignoring
Speaker 1: government regulations is basically his religion. Like it's like like
Speaker 1: like being a billionaire who doesn't comply with the government
Speaker 1: is like his he that's his Jedi faith, and he's
Speaker 1: what are you going to do about it? Yeah? Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1: He's the Luke Skywalker of of polluting. Yeah. Uh. So
Speaker 1: we can get an understanding of Charles Coke's thinking during
Speaker 1: his first couple of decades in charge of Coke Industries
Speaker 1: by reading the stuff that he was writing at the time.
Speaker 1: So in nineteen eight he contributed an article to The
Speaker 1: Libertarian Reader to give you an idea of the intellectual
Speaker 1: tenor of this publication. Uh. An ad on the second
Speaker 1: page is titled let's hear it for the first Amendment
Speaker 1: while we still can. Here's how it opens. Government censorship
Speaker 1: is about to take a great leap forward. A government agency,
Speaker 1: the Federal Communications Commission, believes it has the right to
Speaker 1: act as our parents and restrict the broadcast of certain
Speaker 1: words at times when children just might be listening. Uh.
Speaker 1: There's a box in the middle of the ad that
Speaker 1: just says banned with a question mark and then has
Speaker 1: a list of works including the Bible, Ernest Hemingway, Chaucer,
Speaker 1: you know that big campaign to ban Shaucer, George Orwell,
Speaker 1: and the Nixon Watergate tapes, all of which you are
Speaker 1: still legal. Uh. It ends with a plea for money. Uh.
Speaker 1: That says this coupon fights censorship. Yes, I want to
Speaker 1: help save the public airways from the obscenity of government control.
Speaker 1: Here's my tax deductible and tax deductible is italicized contribution. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So that's the first ad in the Libertarian Reader the
Speaker 1: issue that Charles Coke uh submitted an article called the
Speaker 1: Business Community Resisting Regulation. That's all the s are z
Speaker 1: s right. You're imagine this is like a zine just
Speaker 1: for the coach boys boys business. No, um, it was.
Speaker 1: This article was part of a series called Towards the
Speaker 1: Second American Revolution Libertarian Strategies for Today, and in this article,
Speaker 1: Coke rails against what he calls political capitalism, which he
Speaker 1: defines as a terrible state of affairs wherein businesses work
Speaker 1: with the government and don't reject all regulation out of hand. Quote.
Speaker 1: The final stage of political capitalism is even worse. Richard Ferris,
Speaker 1: president of United airlines an exception in his industry predicts
Speaker 1: continued government control would mean airline service as you know
Speaker 1: it today will be seriously jeopardized and his service and
Speaker 1: equipment deteriorate. You will stand by helplessly as the threat
Speaker 1: of nationalization becomes reality. You remember when the government took
Speaker 1: over all the airlines do? Yeah, it was a bad thing.
Speaker 1: If the airlines had remained private companies, I'm sure there
Speaker 1: would be a lot of leg room on flights, good food,
Speaker 1: high quality customer service. People would not get dragged out
Speaker 1: of flights because they got overbooked. This makes me sick. Uh.
Speaker 1: In his article, Charles argues that businessmen should refuse subsidies
Speaker 1: from the government, so they shouldn't even take money from
Speaker 1: the government and refuse to comply with regulations, even ones
Speaker 1: that benefit their particular business or hurt a competitor. The
Speaker 1: goal is reducing taxes and thus reducing the government. Nothing
Speaker 1: else matters. Regulators must be they have to be battled
Speaker 1: at all costs. Uh. Fred Coke said this, Do not
Speaker 1: cooperate voluntarily. Instead resist wherever and to whatever extent you
Speaker 1: legally can, and do so in the name of justice.
Speaker 1: I love this. This is insane. Yeah, Like that's why
Speaker 1: I'm making like the Star Wars comparisons. He views himself
Speaker 1: as like a rebel fighting this evil empire, but the
Speaker 1: evil empires being like you should pay for old people
Speaker 1: to have health, and he's like, you spilled too much
Speaker 1: poison s into the water. You have to pay for that.
Speaker 1: He shouldn't have been living in Corpus Christy. Why can't
Speaker 1: they be in the Hampton's I don't put there. I
Speaker 1: wish I had like a neck vein that would just pop.
Speaker 1: It is hard to imagine any of the things that
Speaker 1: like he's written that, like when I because I've I
Speaker 1: read a couple of articles Charles Cooke read and it's
Speaker 1: hard to imagine him not screaming them to you, like
Speaker 1: that's that. That's always the tenor at which he writes.
Speaker 1: It's always like everything will be nationalized and the government
Speaker 1: will destroy you know, private innovation whatnot if we don't resist.
Speaker 1: And he does use that like resist language a lot.
Speaker 1: He's described in Dark Money as almost being being a
Speaker 1: like a Linen Marks sort of theorist, where he has
Speaker 1: these very strict ideas on sort of the way societies
Speaker 1: evolve and the way things happen in history. Um, but
Speaker 1: rather than sort of applying it within the context of
Speaker 1: you know, obviously like communet theory or whatnot, he has
Speaker 1: his own sort of like far right libertarian theory. But
Speaker 1: it is a very yeah, yeah, he's he's again, it's
Speaker 1: not about denying these regular like refusing to complay with
Speaker 1: these regulations is not about uh money to him, It's
Speaker 1: about the principle. Yeah, it's always about the principle. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's he's willing to spend more money to stick a
Speaker 1: finger at the gun, just resist at all costs. Did
Speaker 1: I get it, man? Yeah? Do you. I don't get
Speaker 1: inheriting hundreds of millions of dollars and not just being like,
Speaker 1: oh sweet, I lucked out. I'm just gonna have fun.
Speaker 1: I mean, I get wanting to be smart with your
Speaker 1: money and ensuring it, and I wish I had more
Speaker 1: of a monetary education or a financial education. But to
Speaker 1: the point where you're just digging over and forgetting the
Speaker 1: human experience or being so devoid. Is he's almost like
Speaker 1: a serial killer. You know, they have no to sort
Speaker 1: of like compared that mental state, except he's got my
Speaker 1: I mean, he's killing people. Maybe some of it inadvertently,
Speaker 1: but definitely through Yeah, I mean he might be. I
Speaker 1: don't know. Like I always try to hesitate from like
Speaker 1: diagnosing people and stuff. But it is worth noting that
Speaker 1: there are there is scientific research that suggests access to
Speaker 1: wealth reduces empathy. Say that to Bruce Wayne, Well, you
Speaker 1: know he was a rich dude and guess what he
Speaker 1: turned out to be Batman? Well, yeah, but Batman just
Speaker 1: beats up poor people. No, Batman takes care of the poor.
Speaker 1: And Wayne, industries really looks out for people, don't you
Speaker 1: speak industries? You're right? And I do make a Batman
Speaker 1: reference later that's coming up. We have a lot more
Speaker 1: coke to talk about. We have so much coke to
Speaker 1: talk about that where there's going to be another two.
Speaker 1: I need a break. Yeah, you need to need to
Speaker 1: take a chill pill, have a nice cup of cup
Speaker 1: of Doritos, and uh I love Derrito soup. We all
Speaker 1: love Doritos soup. Between you and me. Sometimes I'll boil
Speaker 1: water and throw in a bunch of nacho cheese Dorrito's
Speaker 1: flavor chips and let all that flavor, you know, get
Speaker 1: off the chip, and then this chip dissolves and then
Speaker 1: I eat it like a soup. Now that sounds lovely.
Speaker 1: And you know what I dip in that soup, Dorito's.
Speaker 1: You know what I have actually done is taken Doritos
Speaker 1: and made Mega's with them. It's pretty damn good. Actually,
Speaker 1: copyright there, I mean Dorito's out a copy right that.
Speaker 1: That's another free thing I'm offering you Doritos, Derito's megas.
Speaker 1: You know it's not free these ads, we're not breaking
Speaker 1: into three part one. I'm so excited to break into ads.
Speaker 1: In part two, we're going to be talking about the
Speaker 1: nineteen eighty election where Charles's brother David ran for Vice
Speaker 1: President of the United States. We will be talking about
Speaker 1: the Koke brothers establishment of an empire of think tanks
Speaker 1: and educational institutions, and we will of course talk about
Speaker 1: more people that they're flighting of regulations got killed. Uh
Speaker 1: So all of that and more in part two. But
Speaker 1: first you want to plug some plug doubles like ads, Well,
Speaker 1: your ads, ads for your thing where people can find
Speaker 1: you on the Interwell, I'm so excited for all those ads.
Speaker 1: You're really wanting to support the show. Um, you can
Speaker 1: find me on the internet. I'm in a movie on Netflix.
Speaker 1: Called the fields um at E L S with some
Speaker 1: really fun folks and you can find me on Instagram
Speaker 1: Twitter at E V E R M A I N
Speaker 1: A R D. Yeah. I do a lot of shows
Speaker 1: around town and I have a lot of fun awesome. Well.
Speaker 1: You can find us on the internet at behind the
Speaker 1: Bastards dot com. All of the many many sources, including
Speaker 1: some writings of Charles Coke that we're sources for this episode,
Speaker 1: will be up there. We'll find some pictures too. You
Speaker 1: can also find us on social media at at Bastards pod.
Speaker 1: You can find me at at I right okay uh
Speaker 1: and yeah, we will be back on Thursday talking more coke.
Speaker 1: So get coked out with us later this week. M
Speaker 1: h h h m hm