Tom O’Neill: Manson Prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi Was Compromised

What is the speculation in terms of Bouliosi's connection? Was he given a narrative? Do you think that they... Yeah, I want to answer that. Yeah, so this is... All right, I'll start without the speculative part, something I can prove. He was compromised when he was given this case in 1969. It's in the book. Gosh, I mean, he has family out there, but they know about this. He was involved in a couple cases, the first one before the trial, that are crazy. I mean, when you see the stuff that happened between him and I, you know, all those years later, it makes sense when you see what he was like before he became famous. So in 1965, he had his first child, Vincent Bouliosi Jr. He decided that he wasn't the father, that the milkman was the father. And back in those days, you're too young to know, people used to deliver milk to homes. Yeah, I remember hearing about it. Yeah, so he believed that the milkman was the father. He was an up-and-coming deputy district attorney in Los Angeles. And for about, I think, 12 or 16 months, he stalked his milkman, trying to get him to take a blood test, to prove that he fathered his wife's child. Jesus Christ. It got so bad that they had to, they stopped letting their kids take the bus home from school. They had two young kids. They didn't know who he was. He wouldn't tell them who he was. All he would say was, I was on, the milkman had left the job a month after his wife found out she was pregnant, Vince's wife. Vince and his delirium decided that he was fired because he had gotten, you know, clients, people he delivered milk to, pregnant. So he was writing them anonymous letters, following the kids. I actually, this is one thing I did here. I heard from the little girl who's now a grown woman, read about this in my book, and she sent me a letter. And she goes, you only got half of it. He said, he terrorized us. He said, my father, she said, my father, the moment had a nervous breakdown. She said, he came to my school and picked me up. And he took me to a toy store, bought all these toys for me, whatever I wanted, brought me to the house. And he had a driver. And he left me at the end of the driveway. My mom came out and I was like so happy. I was like five or six years old. I had all these gifts. And she goes, get into the house, get into the house. So what happened was Vince got caught. I mean, he eventually was stalking them. He sent his wife to the house to beg the milkman's wife to get her husband to do a paternity test. And I've got all this from all these civil depositions when it came when the milkman sued him later. So Vince, the milkman eventually got his brother-in-law to follow Vince from one of his stakeouts. Vince would put the car outside the house. He sent them letters like they changed their phone number. He goes, oh, I noticed you changed your phone number. That wasn't nice. I mean, nuts. So the milkman followed Vince, his brother-in-law, got the plate number, found out who he was and that he was at the DA's office, called his personal attorney. And the personal attorney called Vince. And they had a meeting between Vince, the milkman, the milkman's wife, and Mrs. Bouliosi. And Vince admitted that he had been stalking them because he thought it was his wife. He had used DA's investigators calling this guy a material witness in a murder case to follow him, get private information on him. So Vince said he would pay them $100 and never do it again. And the milkman said, we don't want your money. Just never bother us again. So that was all about the end of 68, early 69. The DA's office knew about this. He should have been fired immediately. Instead, he gets the biggest case at that point in the history of Los Angeles, the Tate Lobby-Anka trial. This is where we get speculative. You have a guy like Vince who's compromised. He'll do what the hires up tell him to do. And if you read in the book, Evel Younger was a district attorney at the time. He was a shady guy who'd been in the OSS, which was the predecessor to the CIA, trained in espionage. I won't say too much. It's in the book. That's where we get speculative. If Vince was answering for something, the explanation is because he didn't go into this case clean. He had to do what he was told. That makes all the sense in the world. Yeah. After the Tate Lobby-Anka convictions, in 74, Helter Skelter came out, the book. And to this day, it's the best-selling true crime book of all time. And it's a wonderfully written book. I mean, I could take you page by page and show you stuff that's completely fabricated and made up and that contradicts the real record. But, you know, bestseller. And that same year, Vince was going to run for district attorney. And the milkman and his wife had never told anyone, I guess, outside of their family what had happened four or five years before. When they saw that Vince was trying to be the most powerful law enforcement person in the city of Los Angeles, they went to his opponent and said, you need to know this. This man cannot get this job. So they told the opponent and they had a press conference. So the milkman and his wife went public. Vince responded by having his own press conference and telling the reporters, here's what happened. The milkman, we believe, stole $300 in cash from our kitchen table when he was on the route. So I was just doing a personal investigation. And the reporter said, well, did you hire—I mean, did you contact the Pasadena police? He goes, no, no, I just wanted to do it on my own. And then, as other people pointed out later, he was doing this—this was 65. He was doing it through the end of 68. The statute of limitations on Thaff-Burgerley robbery is three years. Even if he found out that he had stolen the $3, they wouldn't have been able to prosecute it. So the whole thing was a lie. Vince lied to the media. And he lost—so then he lost that election. Then he ran again after Skelter came out for attorney general of California. At that point, the milkman and the wife were going to go public again and say, hey, we have even more to tell about this, which I think is what the daughter wants to tell me. She actually hasn't gotten in touch with me after the first email. I said, I want to hear what you have. And she said she has all these documents. But then a woman named Virginia Cardwell said she was going to go public, too. She came out and said—excuse me. After Vince told the world that the milkman had stolen $300 for him, the milkman and his wife filed a civil suit against Vince and Gail, his wife, because Gail also publicly said with Vince in an interview that that's the truth. It was all about this petty theft. They sued them for defamation, and they settled. And Vince paid them, I think it was $12,000 in cash and $100 bills. And part of the agreement was they weren't allowed to talk about it. They couldn't say they'd gotten any money, and he would only give it in cash so they couldn't trace it to him. I ended up getting all the documents. It took a long time, but I got them. Then when they went public again, when he was running for attorney general, they were subject to being in violation of that. But they said he can't—then we'll tell everything he doesn't want to tell. He lied under oath and deposition, so did his wife about the stalking. So in 1973, Vince had an affair with a woman named Virginia Cardwell. Virginia Cardwell was Catholic. She got pregnant. She told Vince that she was pregnant with his child, and Vince said she had to get an abortion. I can't get an abortion. I'm a Catholic. She was a single mother. He said he would set it up. He had a doctor. It was still illegal then. And he gave her the money to pay the doctor, and then he called her, and she said she had gotten the abortion. Everything was fine. Then he called the doctor, violating HIPAA rules. The doctor said, actually, I've never heard from this woman. I didn't give her the procedure. So Vince went to her house and beat the hell out of her. And I've got all those depositions, too. He just—according to her story to the police, because she reported it, he dragged her across the hair, the floor by the hair, sat in her and punched her and punched her again in the face, told her she had to get an abortion. She miscarried after that episode. She went to the Santa Monica police as soon as he left and reported it. And nobody would have known about it, but reporters saw it on the police wire service or whatever. So the next day it was on the front page of all the L.A. papers that Vince Bouliosi had been accused of battery of a woman who said that he wanted her to have an abortion, and she wouldn't. So Vince went to the police, told them she was lying. She was a client that he had had one phone consultation with, never met her face-to-face. And she was trying to embarrass him because he wanted her to pay him $200 or $300. He defamed her like he did The Milk Man. He made up a story. And worse this time, he told that to the police. This was in their investigation of the battery. He lied to the police. That it had not happened, but here's what happened. The next day, after the newspapers reported it, and Vince said it was a lie, and he told the police that, Vince went back to her apartment with his secretary and a typewriter, and he held her hostage. I know this sounds crazy. It's in the book at the end. He held her hostage for, I think, three or four hours, begging her and then bullying her, and he might have hit her then too, I can't remember, to go to the police and say that she had made the whole story up. His secretary was there because once he got her to agree to do it, she wrote up the backdated bill, the bill for the money, and had Virginia sign it. So Virginia finally agreed to go to the police. She said, look, you're going to be charged with filing a false report, which is a felony. Well, it's a misdemeanor, but it could go to a felony. But I can take care of all that. I've got the connections to the DA's office in Santa Monica, which he did, and he did take care of it. So she called up the Santa Monica Police Department to say she was coming in to report that she had made the story up because she was angry about this money. And the cops said right away he knew that something was wrong in the tremor of her voice. He said, we'll come get you. And Vince was on the other line, and she said, no, no, no. He said, no, no, no, they can't come here. So she said, no, no, no, I'm coming. And they said, OK, we'll see you when you get here. And then they dispatched two cops to her apartment. Now, this had never been public before I found it. It did become public about what happened. Vince got away with denying it. The cop that went to see what was going on and to get her, a guy named Michael Landis, he was retired in Santa Monica. I got his name from the reports. He said, oh, yeah, Vince was at the house. He wouldn't let us in. He said he and his partner, Robert Steinberg, were there, and she's cowering behind them crying. And we got her out of the house, brought her to the station, and she told the story that it was fake. And he said, but we saw him there. She goes, you have no idea how dangerous he is. I made it up. Please. It was a false report. So she got charged. The next day's papers reported that this woman had come out and admitted that the whole thing was made up. Nobody said anything because the cops didn't talk to the reporters about Vince being at the house. And Vince, you know, he prevailed. He won. Then when he ran for attorney general of California in 76, Virginia Cardwell went public. And then Vince said, told the same lie about her. He had never seen her face to face. She was trying to get two or three hundred dollars from him for a phone, or not pay the money for a phone consultation. He lost the attorney general's race when she went public. And again, with the milkman and mistress, then she sued Vince. Same thing. He lied in the depositions. And then when he got caught with the other people who could show that they'd been together and there was a history of they had had an affair for like six months, he resolved it and paid her a substantial amount of money to go away. So this was the kind of person who when I told Vince I was writing about this in my book, he's like, well, number one, I can't talk about either of those cases because they were resolved. And there's non disclosures. And I go, and she know that's not true because I mean, number one, Virginia's dead. She had died. So she can't sue you. And she went public. And so did the wise Ells, the milkman and the mistress. And I wouldn't you know, I'm not interested in your sordid personal life, but it's relevant because I'm arguing that you committed crimes and the prosecution of the Manson family. So born perjury, hid evidence, you know, manipulated the defense by planning an attorney. So if I'm going to try to make this case and everyone's not going to believe it because you're Vince Bouliossi, you know, this prominent prosecutor author. Well, I have to show that there's a pattern in this behavior, not only that you're lying under oath in the depositions in these two cases before you settle, but you also lie to the police in the in the Cardwell case. And you lie to the papers and both. If I have that in my book, then people will be more prone to believe that you do the same thing in the Tate Labianca trial that you would break rules to win your convictions. Did he have a ghost writer for Helter Skelter? No, he had a collaborator, Kurt Gentry. Yeah. Yeah. OK. So that makes sense. Yeah. And I sounds like an insane person. Insane person would probably not be able to make such a coherent book. I know he had every book he wrote. He had collaborators. He so the milkman's wife in her deposition said that when Gail, Vince's wife, came to her house and knocked on her door and said, please do this. My husband's making me crazy. We know that he's your husband. The milkman isn't the father of my boy, but just do it to make him stop. And the milkman's wife said, we're not we don't want to have anything to do with you people. Just leave us alone and go away. And she goes, you don't understand. My husband is mentally ill. He goes, he'll never stop this. There's nothing I can do to get him to stop at the end of our six hours. I don't remember if I put it in the book. I might not have. He said to me, you know, Gil thinks I have some psychiatric issues and she's been trying to get me to go to a doctor forever. So, you know, I'm not saying that this is the reason some of this stuff might have happened, but I do, you know, I don't even know why he would tell me that. But yeah, so I think that he was able to be manipulated because of these vulnerabilities. Because it was so compromised. Yeah. Yeah. Do completely make sense. Yeah. Completely makes sense. Holy shit. He had a family, a whole other secret family, daughter and a mistress for the next 30 years. I interview the mistress. I didn't put it in the book. I didn't think it was necessary. I guess now I'm telling it, but it actually got reported after he died as the mistress had told a few other people I'd known about her for years. And I knew he had a daughter who was, you know, at the time of Vince's death, she was in her thirties, I think.