Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties

by Tom O'Neill, Dan Piepenbring (With)

Overview

A journalist's twenty-year fascination with the Manson murders leads to shocking new revelations about the FBI's involvement in this riveting reassessment of an infamous case in American history.




Over two grim nights in Los Angeles, the young followers of Charles Manson murdered seven people, including the actress Sharon Tate, then eight months pregnant. With no mercy and seemingly no motive, the Manson Family followed their leader's every order -- their crimes lit a flame of paranoia across the nation, spelling the end of the sixties. Manson became one of history's most infamous criminals, his name forever attached to an era when charlatans mixed with prodigies, free love was as possible as brainwashing, and utopia -- or dystopia -- was just an acid trip away.


Twenty years ago, when journalist Tom O'Neill was reporting a magazine piece about the murders, he worried there was nothing new to say. Then he unearthed shocking evidence of a cover-up behind the "official" story, including police carelessness, legal misconduct, and potential surveillance by intelligence agents. When a tense interview with Vincent Bugliosi -- prosecutor of the Manson Family and author of Helter Skelter -- turned a friendly source into a nemesis, O'Neill knew he was onto something. But every discovery brought more questions:

• Who were Manson's real friends in Hollywood, and how far would they go to hide their ties?
• Why didn't law enforcement, including Manson's own parole officer, act on their many chances to stop him?
• And how did Manson -- an illiterate ex-con -- turn a group of peaceful hippies into remorseless killers?

O'Neill's quest for the truth led him from reclusive celebrities to seasoned spies, from San Francisco's summer of love to the shadowy sites of the CIA's mind-control experiments, on a trail rife with shady cover-ups and suspicious coincidences. The product of two decades of reporting, hundreds of new interviews, and dozens of never-before-seen documents from the LAPD, the FBI, and the CIA, Chaos mounts an argument that could be, according to Los Angeles Deputy District Attorney Steven Kay, strong enough to overturn the verdicts on the Manson murders. This is a book that overturns our understanding of a pivotal time in American history.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780316477543
Publisher:	Little, Brown and Company
Publication date:	06/23/2020
Pages:	528
Sales rank:	176
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.20(h) x 1.50(d)

About the Author

Tom O'Neill is an award-winning investigative journalist and entertainment reporter whose work has appeared in national publications such as Us, Premiere, New York, the Village Voice, and Details. He graduated with a Bachelor in Fine Arts from New York University's Tisch School of the Arts and currently resides in Venice, CA.

Table of Contents

Prologue 3

1 The Crime of the Century 11

2 An Aura of Danger 44

3 The Golden Penetrators 86

4 The Holes in Helter Skelter 116

5 Amnesia at the L.A. County Sheriff's Office 141

6 Who Was Reeve Whitson? 183

7 Neutralizing the Left 208

8 The Lawyer Swap 236

9 Manson's Get-Out-of-Jail-Free Card 271

10 The Haight-Ashbury Free Medical Clinic 304

11 Mind Control 341

12 Where Does It All Go? 391

Epilogue 429

Acknowledgments 437

Notes 443

Index 506

Editorial Reviews

★ 04/01/2019

In his riveting debut, journalist O’Neill, assisted by coauthor Piepenbring, offers sensational revelations about the Tate-LaBianca murders at the hand of Charles Manson and his so-called family in Los Angeles in 1969. What began as a feature assignment for Premiere magazine on the 30th anniversary of the crime turned into O’Neill’s 20-year obsession with the murders. He questions the official narrative of the case, that Manson hated blacks and wanted to make it look as though the murderers were black revolutionaries, for instance, by writings pigs, a popular slang term for cops at that time, on the walls of both houses in the victims’ blood. O’Neill interviewed more than 500 witnesses, reporters, and cops in the course of his meticulous research. O’Neill suggests that drug dealers who knew Manson may have hired him to initiate “a vengeful massacre” on actor Sharon Tate and the other victims. O’Neill also uncovered the inexplicable leniency shown Manson and Susan Atkins before the murders by their parole officers when they broke the terms of their parole yet were never jailed for the offenses. In addition, O’Neill posits that Manson might have been one of the subjects of the CIA’s LSD/hallucinogens experiments. True crime fans will be enthralled. Agent: Sloan Harris, ICM. (June)

Publishers Weekly

This is a book I can wholeheartedly recommend…It’s fucking amazing…This shit goes deep and it’s fascinating.”—Joe Rogan

"Chaos is less a definitive account of the murders than a kaleidoscope swirl of weird discoveries and mind-bending hypotheticals that reads like Raymond Chandler after a tab of windowpane."—The New York Times

"What if everything we thought we knew about the Manson murders was wrong? O'Neill spent 20 years wrestling with that question, and Chaos is his final answer. Timed to the 50th anniversary of the Manson murders, it's a sweeping indictment of the Los Angeles justice system, with cover-ups reaching all the way up to the FBI and CIA."—Entertainment Weekly

"O'Neill's discoveries are stunning, especially when he's discussing the inexplicable leniency shown by law enforcement officials and by Manson's parole officer."—The Washington Post

"If Helter Skelter whets your whistle, then O'Neill's blistering account of the conspiracy to cover up the flaws in the Manson prosecution is definitely your cup of tea."—Nerdist

"A page-turner stacked with gobsmacking facts."—The Ringer

"O'Neill's skillful accumulation of facts, untainted by bluffery, is a victory for honest discourse ... The discoveries that O'Neill has shared with the world-about lies, suppressions, and conflicts of interest-should scare the hell out of us."—Sean Howe, Bookforum

"Forget Tarantino's film, journalist O'Neill has been working on this book for 20 years and has found all kind of interesting things, including unreleased documents and new interviews that show legal misconduct... Conspiracy or not, this is what you call beach reading."—Style Weekly (Richmond)

"Whatever you think you know about the Manson murders is wrong. Just flat out wrong. Tom O'Neill's twenty years of meticulous research has unearthed revelations about the murders, the murderers, the prosecutors who tried them and a rogues gallery of cops, drug dealers, bent doctors, famous celebrities, grotesque government research, secret agents and shadowy figures in a conspiracy/cover up so sweeping and bizarre, you'll be as astounded as you are terrified. If your friends call you paranoid, maybe they're just ignorant."—Joe Ide, author of IQ and Wrecked

"Gripping masterful stuff. A dazzling and compellingly obsessed journalistic detective story that invites you down the rabbit-hole to a sex, drugs, and celebrity-serial-killer America. O'Neill's sunk decades into uncovering something far freakier than Helter Skelter ever admitted. Buckle up kids, this is true crime at its truest and most compelling."—Charles Graeber, Executive Producer of The Disappearance of Madeleine McCann and New York Times bestselling author of The Good Nurse

"Fans of conspiracy theories will find this a source of endless fascination."—Kirkus

"Top-notch investigative work ... An excellent work of investigative journalism proving the 'true story' is not always the truth."—Library Journal

"Riveting ... True crime fans will be enthralled."—Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)

From the Publisher

05/01/2019

It's been 50 years since the brutal killing of actress Sharon Tate and her house guests in August 1969 in Los Angeles. Decades after the murders and the conviction of the killers, Charles Manson and his Family, Vincent Bugliosi and Curt Gentry wrote Helter Skelter, asserting that the murders were motivated by Manson's desire to start a race war, inspired by his reading of the Beatles song of the same name. However, journalist O'Neill, while on assignment for Premiere magazine to cover the 30th anniversary of the crimes, unraveled a series of discrepancies. This book, cowritten with New Yorker contributor Piepenbring, digs deep into events and connections before the killings, including Manson's relationship with his parole officer and countless pages of redacted police reports. O'Neil's top-notch investigative work persisted for nearly two decades. Here, he and Piepenbring offer a sobering look into the world of domestic spying in the 1960s and make a convincing argument that there is much more to this case than Bugliosi and Gentry's narrative presents. VERDICT An excellent work of investigative journalism proving the "true story" is not always the truth.—Bart Everts, Rutgers Univ.-Camden Lib., NJ

Library Journal

2019-04-23
Who put Charlie and the Family up to their murderous mischief? This long excursus on the killings that terrified Los Angeles 50 years ago suggests some unlikely answers.

How did it happen that a bunch of peace freaks turned into a band of homicidal maniacs? In this overlong but provocative barrage, freelance journalist O'Neill charts a series of conjectures that begins with famed prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi and ends in the dark chambers of the intelligence community. The logic goes something like this: It's useful to control people's minds, but it's difficult to accomplish if they're sane. If they're a little off balance, needy, and disaffected, though, then give them a charismatic leader and some chores, and voilà—and along the way, if LSD is involved, then you can serve up an object lesson about the dangers of drugs. O'Neill's thesis has its possibilities, but, like Oliver Stone's JFK—and the Kennedy assassination figures here—it's not so much that he ventures a theory as that he ventures all of them: The FBI wanted to whip up racial division to divide the New Left from the Black Panthers, Manson was an agent provocateur, record producer and Hollywood insider Terry Melcher had a hand in the whole thing, Beach Boy Dennis Wilson was a silent partner. And then there was Roman Polanski and his weird proclivities—as O'Neill writes, "remember how Susan Atkins wrote the word ‘Pig' on the front door of Cielo Drive, in Sharon Tate's blood?" But what if she really wrote something else? It's all too much. Among the best aspects of the book are the author's confessions of the many dead ends and blank spots he encountered, as when he confronted Bugliosi with the suggestion that he knew more than he was letting on and in fact covered up some of the evidence. "It was the wrong move," he writes. "I'd intended to build to this moment, and now I was leading with it, giving him every reason to take a contentious tone."

Fans of conspiracy theories will find this a source of endless fascination.

Kirkus Reviews