by Erik Larson
“I understand someone could conceivably misuse the information,” Lund said. “I know that. Absolutely. There’s no question in my mind about it. But I am not responsible for someone misusing information.”
“Why publish the book at all?” I asked. “Does the world really need a five-hundred-page book on how to kill?”
For the first and only time during my visit, Lund flared with anger: “If you want to pin me down on moral culpability, I cannot accept it. I cannot accept it.”
Besides, he argued, Paladin published much more than books on how to kill and bomb. He cited books on military history and self-defense, and a handbook for law-enforcement officers.
Paladin’s eclectic tastes can lead to some odd juxtapositions in its catalog. For example, Streetwork: The Way to Police Officer Safety and Survival appeared on page forty-four of one of its catalogs. According to Lund, its author was a San Diego police officer. Kill Without Joy appeared two pages earlier.
Paladin readers are not crooks, Lund said. Many customers, he argued, buy his books as a “cathartic,” a means of harmlessly working off frustrations with bosses, ex-wives, and intractable institutions by imagining acts of violence and revenge. “I think there are many, many Walter Mittys on our mailing list, people who live in a fantasy world.”
Michael Hoy, owner of Loompanics Unlimited of Port Town-send, Washington, another mail-order publisher with a taste for handbooks on violence, told me he doubted Paladin’s books or his own triggered any crimes—although he was quick to add that a “couple hundred” of his own customers were already in prison. Once a week he prepared a special catalog just for them by tearing out pages on improvised firearms and other topics that prison officials tended to frown on. He did not believe that killers needed to read such books as Kill Without Joy, which Loompanics buys from Paladin and resells. “I just don’t think that’s how serial killers operate, reading books and all.”
One Loompanics offering is Physical Interrogation Techniques by Richard Krousher. The book, according to a Loompanics catalog, “tells you the best ways to tie and bind a subject for physical interrogation, where to obtain tools and devices needed, and even how to get the guy to torture himself while you’re out for coffee.”
Hoy’s own lead-stomached staff refused to proofread it, so he took on the task alone. “It’s a pretty gruesome book,” he told me. “I was pretty sick of that stuff myself by the time I was done.” Nonetheless, by the time we spoke in December 1992 he had sold 5,500 copies.
A big fan of Lund and his company, Hoy gushed, “It’s just a joy doing business with Paladin Press.”
Paladin seems to have a good many satisfied customers. Many write fan mail to the company, applauding both its efficient service and its daring. A San Antonio customer wrote: “I’ve got to give you credit, you offer controversial, often shocking literature that is invaluable to all Americans. It’s a pity that all mail-order companies don’t follow your example.”
Here are three of the five books this particular customer ordered, along with excerpts from their catalog descriptions:
Expedient Hand Grenades, by G. Dmitrieff. “Almost anyone can now master the art of constructing an effective hand grenade. One of America’s leading ordnance designers makes it simple with easily understood instructions that describe the equipment and methods needed to make two optimum models: the fragmentation and incendiary grenades.”
Improvised Explosives: How to Make Your Own, by Seymour Lecker. “With ease, you can construct such devices as a package bomb, booby-trapped door, auto (mobile) trap, sound-detonated bomb or pressure mine, to name just a few.”
The Mini-14 Exotic Weapons System (no author listed). “Convert your Mini into a full-auto, silenced, SWAT-type weapon that is capable of field-clearing firepower. Note that this conversion process requires no machining or special tools. Once completed, it takes just five minutes to drop in the Automatic Connector (the book’s secret) or remove it as needed. It’s that simple!” [The Mini-14, made by Sturm, Ruger & Co., is a semiautomatic rifle.]
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 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 Munition
s 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 Paladin 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?
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br /> 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.”
