Lethal Passage_ The Story of a Gun - Erik Larson [84]
An urgent need for revenge apparently prompted a customer in Valdosta, Georgia, to write for a copy of George Hayduke’s Get Even.
“I have a lot of people that need to get screwed for a change!” this customer wrote. At the bottom, he added: “Rush please! They are way past due!”
A Wallingford, Pennsylvania, parent was less than thrilled, however: “Take our son’s name off your mailing list immediately. You should be stopped from sending your publication through the mail to minors.”
Bomb squad members are some of Paladin’s most motivated customers. Joseph Grubisic, commander of the Chicago police bomb and arson section, told me he put himself on Paladin’s mailing list and bought any new book on explosives in order to be prepared for future encounters with the fruits of the book’s instructions. As a training exercise, members of each shift build hoax bombs (without explosives) and pass them along to colleagues on other shifts, who then attempt to defuse them. Often, Grubisic said, the shifts design their bombs using Paladin books as a guide.
Investigators often find books from Paladin and its competitors in the possession of bombing suspects. “Hundreds of times,” an ATF bomb expert told me.
Although a direct connection between the books and bombs is almost always difficult to prove, ATF agents now routinely look for such books in their searches of suspects’ homes and use them to buttress their cases in court. The connection can be close. A few years ago a religious zealot tried bombing an X-rated drive-in theater in Pennsylvania by attaching fourteen explosive charges to the posts that supported the screen. Only one charge went off. The ATF lab analyzed the remaining explosives and discovered the contents matched a formula from The Poor Man’s James Bond, published by Desert Publications of El Dorado, Arkansas, but sold both by Paladin and Loompanics. The lab was even able to cite the page. When agents searched the suspect’s home, they found the book.
These “burn-and-blow” books may pose the gravest danger to their own users. Any bomb recipe is dangerous, no matter how precise. Even a change in the weather can cause a devastating change in chemical reactions needed to make such explosives as nitroglycerin. Some published recipes are flat-out wrong, particularly, experts say, in The Anarchist’s Cookbook, published by Barricade Books of Secaucus, New Jersey, and sold by Paladin. (“It’s kind of like the Physicians’ Desk Reference” one assistant U.S. attorney told me. “Every self-respecting terrorist has to have The Anarchist’s Cookbook.”) The experts won’t say exactly where the errors lie, preferring to pick up the pieces of wannabe bombers rather than innocent civilians.
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