DID YOU KNOW? CHARLES MANSON & US PROBATION

PART ONE

by Brian J. Kelly - Supervisory Cyber Analyst

On November 19, 2017, Charles Milles Manson died at the age of 83 while in the custody of the California Department of Corrections. Manson was most famously known as the leader of the Manson Family, a California-based cult whose members committed a series of murders, including that of film actress Sharon Tate. Notably, Manson did not directly take part in the murders, but prosecutors contended that his ideology constituted an overt act of conspiracy. Manson’s story has been covered numerous times in books, film, music, documentaries, and much more, but there are aspects to his life and history that are not so well known.

In 2019, investigative reporter and writer Tom O’Neill https://tom-oneill.org published Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties, a 20-year journey by O’Neill into the web of the life of Manson and all the mystery that surrounded him. It is a highly recommended read simply from the extensive research O'Neill conducted, and massive amount of information he compiled. One of the more interesting aspect of Manson's life highlighted by O’Neill, from the perspective of this author as a retired U.S. Probation Officer, is that Manson’s entire incarceration history, outside of his final incarceration in California, was within the federal prison system. The following is an excerpt from Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties:

“Another peculiarity: all of Manson’s prison time was at the federal level. Bugliosi found this startling. “Probably ninety-nine out of one-hundred criminals never see the inside of a federal court,” he noted. Manson had been described as “criminally sophisticated,” but had he been convicted at the state level, he would’ve faced a fraction of the time behind bars—maybe less than five years, versus seventeen. Within days of his release, Manson violated his parole. Unless he had explicit permission, he was supposed to stay put; he was forbidden from leaving Los Angeles under penalty of automatic repatriation to prison. But practically immediately, he headed to Berkeley, California. Years earlier, Manson had had his parole revoked just for failing to report to his supervisor. Now, for some reason, the police bureaucracy of an entirely different city welcomed him with open arms. When he called up the San Francisco Federal Parole Office to announce himself, they simply filed some routine paperwork transferring him to the supervision of Roger Smith, an officer and a student at UC Berkeley’s School of Criminology.”

FBI Records: The Vault https://vault.fbi.gov/ contains over 6,700 documents on various topics such as Organized Crime, Public Corruption, Unexplained Phenomenon, etc. The Vault also maintains documents on Charles Manson https://vault.fbi.gov/Charles%20Manson Within these documents, I located a breakdown of Manson’s criminal history from a FBI identification record-collector of fingerprints dated March 22, 1956:

Manson’s exclusivity to the federal criminal justice system, along with his handling while under federal community supervision, piqued O’Neill’s curiosity and led him down a path to the CIA and Project MK Ultra. Stay tuned for Part Two…. 

IPPC Technologies continues to strive towards predictive and proactive solutions so officers can intervene early, address areas of concern and change behavior. Spotlight’s mission is to provide agencies and officers with streamlined and verified leads, for possible intervention opportunities related to concerning behaviors.  For more information on Spotlight, please call IPPC at (888)-WEB-IPPC or contact me directly at bkelly@ippctech.net or by calling (516)341-4201.