Kinda-Wikipedia: James Randi and the Trail of Wreckage Behind Him

This began as a series of emails between myself and Eric Barbour on Randall James Zwinge (James Randi) this summer. Pretty much I am writing about James Randi because he is 91 years old at time of posting, and I fear that if he were to die in the next six months that a "canonization" would begin from the remains of the James Randi Educational Foundation, the people at CSI(COP) who are still fans, his former JREF message board (now run by "International Skeptics" maybe-group), and various others. Had he died a decade ago, the resistance, fanboy rage, and other irrationalities would have made talking about Randi's darker aspects online nearly impossible. As it is, his Wikipedia BLP (biography) has people watching it. One of my sources for this article was Tim Cridland's 2016 review of Randi's biographic documentary An Honest Liar (2014) for which Cridland set up a one-shot blog. Tim Cridland has a background both in investigative reporting through his unfortunately-defunct 'zine Off the Deep End and in the sort of stage performance James Randi started out in - Cridland is also "Zamora the Torture King" a sideshow human blockhead. Randi started out as "Randall the Telepath", but then we are getting ahead of ourselves.

Randi up to 1968

Randall James Zwinge was born in Toronto, Canada on August 7, 1928. He dropped out of Canadian high school at the age of 17, and started doing magic for a travelling carnival - he was into magic since childhood when he had seen Henry Blackstone, Sr. perform, and doing card tricks passed the time when he was in a cast after a childhood bicycle accident. For a lot of his early career (1946 onward) he seemed to orbit around Toronto doing both the aforementioned stage mentalist act ("Randall the Telepath"), doing escapism magic (he liked escaping from straightjackets while hanging upside-down in the air - he later mocked that bit in a cameo on Happy Days in 1978) and being involved with the Toronto Globe and Mail's predecessor Midnight, which was a nightlife publication in the 1950s. Cridland mentions this publication in his 2013 interview with Radio Misterioso (Greg Bishop) on the predecessor article to the movie review, a 2012 The Anomalist magazine article titled "The Real James Randi." What Cridland discovered is that Randi is rather loose with recounting his own past - before he was a high school dropout he allegedly destroyed a Spiritualist church through his understanding of "cold reading" as a teenager. But had he? Was there such a church or group? Cridland in his interview says he could not find any scrap of proof that the incident occurred.

The "Randall the Telepath" act had that same problem - according to Cridland he advertised himself as an actual telepath, not a stage act. He also made predictions or psychic "detective work" for money as late as the age of 26:

.....In the early days Randi represented himself to the public and to the media as a genuine mind reader. In later interviews and accounts he would always claim he did this only briefly, but the historical record shows that this went on from his teens until at least the age of 26. The film shows a very public prediction that Randi, then known as Randall Zwinge, made for a Toronto newspaper. In the film Randi says the prediction, which seemingly foretells the outcome of the World Series, happened when he was 21.
 In a self-recorded interview, Randi would say that he was always able to talk his way out if a reporter or interviewer would bring past claims of being psychic. Over the years Randi has a tale of a man from Florida who came to visit him believing he had genuine psychic powers and offered him money to give him information. In one version, told in Randi's book Conjuring [1992], he wants to know the outcome of horses races. Randi then elaborates on the moral dilemma this caused him and states that that was one of the reasons he dropped the whole phony psychic routine. In AHL, Randi's friend, magician Penn Jillette, talks of this time in Randi's life and says that is commendable that “...he backed away from it." 
 The problem is that Randi has said he backed away, but the record shows he went back to it again and again. Randi's account in Conjuring refers to the World Series prediction and states that he was "eighteen years old" when this occurred. There are other accounts of similar predictions from different years. Both my article and AHL show that Randi's claims of being psychic went on for at least eight years beyond his supposed encounter with the unnamed man from Florida. Randi's reasons for dropping the psychic routine are much more likely related to his success as a stage magician and escape artist than a moral dilemma.
 Although Randi and his associates demand a high criteria for accuracy in the people and claims they scrutinize, Randi gets away with slippery story telling.....

And this isn't even mentioning his time doing horoscopes as "Zo-ran" in Midnight - today he would say "it was an experiment in gullibility", back then he was doing it for a paycheck.

By the early 1960s Randi was in New York City, living in Greenwich Village and doing regular stage magic while also appearing on Long John Nebel's WOR-AM radio talk show. When Nebel left that station to go to syndication, James Randi took over the show. Along the way Randi came into contact with James Moseley, the editor of Saucer News (later Saucer Smear); we don't know if they ran into each other through Nebel's show or the Joe Pyne syndicated TV talk show (Moseley made a number of appearances on The Joe Pyne Show - Pyne was a conservative talk show host well-known for his "Beef Box" segment where people could voice whatever annoyed them). Either way, they became friendly, Randi interviewed Moseley's associate Grey Barker, and Timothy "Mr. UFO" Beckley, who was sharing office space with James Moseley at 303 Fifth Avenue in New York City. On the ground floor was the then recently-installed FAO Schwartz toy store while the Moseley-Beckley office was a small space floors up. Randi was impressed with Beckley, who was on his way to being a prolific author/publisher of UFO and paranormal books of varying quality and later founder of the 1970s UFO Investigators League (which died by the early 1980s and was revived in 1990 only to die again). According to Beckley:

"...Randi and I shared a small office at 303 Fifth Ave in Manhattan that was also occupied by Jim Moseley of UFO fame. I traveled with Randi to several of his gigs. I remember one in particular at a high school gym where he levitated a young lady and the curtain shook behind him." Beckley told me that Randi wanted him to be his manager and this is why he accompanied him to some of his shows. That's right, Randi wanted Mr. UFO to be his manager.

Nothing came of it, but Randi did attend the 1967 Congress of Scientific Ufologists run by Moseley, and was photographed by UFO contactee Frank Stranges, standing next to Andy "The Mystic Barber" Sinatra, and the photo was put in Stranges' book Stranger at the Pentagon (two words: "Valiant Thor.") Below is the photo, screen-captured from Cridland's blog; notice that Randi has his "The Amazing" moniker already.

When the Table Flipped: 1973

After his time on WOR was up, Randi continued to do his stage act. According to the Internet Movie Database, he appeared in the pilot and on a few test segments of Sesame Street in 1969. Wikipedia claims that Randi appeared as "The Magic Clown" in a 1970 Canadian revival of the ancient 1949-1959 Bonomo Magic Clown show. The original was little more than magician Sam Wishner doing his pre-existing Zovello character making (Bonomo's) Turkish taffy appear and disappear for audiences of fez-wearing kids - the Montreal-taped version had the clown and God-knows-what went on for thirty minutes. I have not been able to find a photo of Randi in his clown getup, video of the show, etc. I can tell you that Wishner quit the original in 1952 and the Bonomo clown was played by different actors/mimes/magicians until the show was cancelled. In any case, the Canadian version only lasted until 1971. Two years later Uri Geller hit the United States and that's when Randi became a skeptic.

Before we talk about about why Randi went skeptic, we need to talk about organized skepticism itself. Pretty much there were no organizations of skeptics outside of academia after ancient Greece, unless you want to count the Fortean Society run by Tiffany Thayer from 1931 to his death in 1959; Charles Hoy Fort was an arch-doubter of the weird stuff he researched. (Of course today's skeptics do not consider Fort to be one of their own.) By the 1970s the American Humanist Association (founded in 1941) had grown large enough to consider backing a skeptical organization, which they did after the AHA magazine The Humanist published the statement "Objections to Astrology" in their September-October 1975 issue. Unfortunately they also took on Michel Gauquelin's "Mars Effect" theory, which became part of a fiasco for the newly-assembled "Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal" (CSICOP) that Wikipedia is still trying to minimize forty years later. So who was part of CSICOP when it started? There were the big names like Carl Sagan (who had stopped being open-minded about UFOs after the Condon Committee report came out in 1969) and Isaac Asimov (scientist, atheist, author on a number of subjects, owner of roving hands), but those people didn't do any work, just lent gravitas to the group. The real workers were guys like Martin Gardner (science and math writer, magician); Marcello Truzzi (edited The Zetetic, the first CSICOP magazine, also professor of Sociology and a magician); Phil Klass (avionics expert, UFO debunker, master of the poison pen); and Joe Nickell (field debunker, magician, appeared on In Search of.... in 1979 to demonstrate how the Shroud of Turin could have been faked using bas relief method, numerous TV appearances since). You are probably noticing that there are a lot of magicians already, without mentioning that Randi was there from the beginning. George P. Hansen wrote a paper on CSICOP in 1992 - he lists thirteen names of notable magicians who were involved with the group from 1976 to 1992 and I've named four of them. (More on that later.) The final two people involved with early CSICOP were the astronomer Dennis Rawlins (who was still angry about his treatment twenty years later), and the founder Paul Kurtz, who was part of the AHA and also owner/manager of Prometheus Books (founded 1969) which had been doing skepticism in book form - this would become a one-two punch in the 1980s; people would debunk things in Skeptical Inquirer, then a book would be written doing a longer debunking later and that would be "case closed" on the issue - even though many of the issues "debunked" kept showing up. (Case in point: Phil Klass wrote a book published by Prometheus in 1989, UFO Abductions: A Dangerous Game making a case that it was all hysteria and hype, yet to this day there are witnesses making the basic claim that odd humanoids show up in their houses at night, either to pass along bizarre information, or conduct examinations, or amble through the building before they vanish. Night terrors? Or topics made unpalatable for research by CSICOP's campaigns?) It should also be pointed out that Prometheus Books (according to Hansen) is one of the few outsider organizations that advertised in magazines for stage magicians.

Before we turn back to Randi and Uri Geller, we need to define just what modern skepticism is. In short it is the return of logical positivism, a 1920s ramping up of August Comte's work in philosophy, and LP was practiced by the "Vienna circle" under Moritz Schlick; the group were scientific-oriented philosophers and philosophy-oriented scientists who met in cafes to hammer issues out. The only truths that counted in logical positivism were scientific ones - metaphysics was strictly valueless, a word game. The philosophy spread into the English-speaking world thanks to the exile of Austrian academics in the late 1930s, then petered out after the 1950s - either the science had gotten too complicated or logical positivism was seen as too confining or quantum theory predicted the rise of philosophical postmodernism. The difference with the new skepticism is that it was run by scientists with no philosophical backing and it had certain American proclivities - it was economically neo-liberal ("deregulated markets") and had that upper middle class orientation that Ivy League professors were supposed to hold, with the quiet belief that the American masses were gullible and needed to be lead. The membership of CSICOP was mostly male and older and this would later create friction when younger people got into skepticism in the George W. Bush years, especially females and openly gay people.

Uri Geller (b. 1946) seemed to come from nowhere when he hit America in the early 1970s, and his act infuriated Randi. Geller claimed he had gotten his powers by being zapped by a UFO as a child, but he had quickly become a big deal as a male model and nightclub performer in his native Israel in the late 1960s. Maybe it was the fact that Geller had moved so fast, or possibly Randi had begun doubting the odd things that he talked about on WOR - allegedly the "million dollar challenge" began as a "thousand dollar challenge" in 1964, and at the 1967 Congress for Scientific Ufologists he was quoted by a Washington Post reporter: "Let's not fool ourselves. There are some garden variety liars involved in all this. But in among all the trash and nonsense perpetrated in the name of Ufology, I think there is a small grain of truth." According to Tim Cridland in an interview with Craig Bishop (Radio Misterioso), Randi later claimed that Geller was stealing his business, but that this was not the case - Cridland claims that the number of shows he did was the same. We are not Randi's biographer; we don't have his private notes, emails, and memoranda so we can't "read his mind"......that written, Geller got under Randi's skin deeply and for the rest of his life, Randi was involved with various fracases with the Israeli.

"Starbaby" and Dennis Rawlins

The initial 1975 ad promoting CSICOP in The Humanist was titled "Objections to Astrology" in conjunction with an article critical of astrology that took potshots at the work of Michel and Francoise Gauquelin, "neo-astrologers" who had discovered a thing in 1955 called "the Mars Effect." Through statistics the Gauquelins had discovered that athletes born when Mars was "in ascension" (from ground-level on Earth, Mars appears to be at different heights above the horizon at different times of the year) seemed to perform better than those born when Mars was not. The article that slammed the "Mars Effect" was written by Lawrence Jerome and his math was not as good as M. Gauquelin's and the couple was willing to sue Jerome or the AHA. Paul Kurtz, American Humanist Assoc. honcho and founder/operator of Prometheus Books wanted a proper debunking, so he dragged CSICOP co-founder Dennis Rawlins in to do the job.....Rawlins was an astronomer, after all. In 1981, Rawlins sent Fate magazine the article "sTARBABY" outlining what an utter mess this attempted debunking was. It started off with a two week deadline, then evolved into a "Challenge" by UCLA astronomer George Abell and Marvin Zelen (head of the statistical laboratory at SUNY-Buffalo and later Harvard Universtity.) Rawlins spent a year examining the Effect, had written an article correcting Jerome's blunders within Kurtz' fortnight deadline (The Humanist published the correction/response). Meanwhile Zelen and Abell had not carried out their "Challenge" experiment. CSICOP was formally founded during the Walpurgisnacht-May Day (4-30 to 5-1) holiday* in Buffalo, NY in 1976. The two day event had heavy press coverage, or as Rawlins put it in "sTARBABY": 

......I gave one of the Founders' Day speeches. It contained enough good press copy and one-liners to get me selected for the nine-man ruling Council of CSICOP.

    Founders' Day was above all a media event. Reporters were wooed and catered to. I certainly had no objection to that, having had largely pleasant encounters with the media. But I was naive about the one overriding reality: a Committee that lives by the media will inevitably be ruled by its publicists, not by its scholars.  

 I would encourage the reader to click on the link above to read the entire article because the situation just gets more and more complicated as Paul Kurtz starts deflecting and the Abell-Zelen team pick up more supporters and time drags on and the late Seventies slip by without CSICOP doing the experiment, though Rawlins was doing the math by computer with an assistant and trying to figure a way of explaining the alleged Effect. Because this post is about Randi, however, what I can say is that in Rawlins' recounting, James Randi is hovering in the background until near the end when in late 1978:

 .....Randi and I drove to Washington together on December 4. Late that afternoon while Michael Hutchinson and I were in Randi's suite, Kurtz called to speak with me.
    He immediately accused me of lying and conspiring against him (this only a few days after trying to organize a secret movement to have me thrown off the Council for the crime of dissent). [8]  I asked him to cite a single falsehood l'd ever told him. Unable to name one, he asked me to say what I thought his deceits were. I offered to provide a partial catalog if he were really interested -- but would do it at the Council meeting the next day.
    Kurtz wanted to know if I intended to attack sTARBABY at the press conference. When I refused to make any promises, Kurtz grew more furious. We couldn't have a "schism," he said.
    Council met the next day at Councilor Phil Klass' apartment. I noticed that Randi was his usual friendly self when Kurtz wasn't around but when he was within earshot Randi made different noises. He repeatedly cracked loudly, "Drink the Kool-Aid, Dennis." (This was shortly after the Jonestown Kool-Aid mass suicide.) During the afternoon meeting, when we established a rule for expelling Councilors, Randi bellowed that it is called the "Rawlins rule."
    Randi meant, of course, that expulsion could come for public dissent. No other Councilor present (Gardner was not) said a word to suggest any other inference. I might add that two months later Randi foolishly boasted about how he "had to work to keep Dennis in line" in Washington, having convinced himself, apparently, that his threats had kept me quiet.
    How these things grow! In 1975 and 1976 it was just a dumb, arrogant mistake by only three CSICOP Fellows. In 1977 it was their BS report, deliberate deception-cover-up. The next year, 1978, brought Kurtz's attempts first to bribe me and then (secretly) to eject me. Now there were Randi's threats....

[8] That Councilors Kurtz, Randi, Philip Klass, and Lee Nisbet conspired to keep dissent (read "schism") from sullying the press conference was eventually admitted from the inside in a July 6, 1979, conversation. (See also June 26 document prepared by Randi and marked "Confidential," discussed below.) 

Rawlins wrote a memo to the other CSICOP Fellows, "On Fighting Pseudoscience With Other Pseudoscience" on Randi's private behavior and the press conference that followed when Rawlins felt compelled to not state CSICOP's internal clumsiness openly, fearing an outburst from Paul Kurtz. By late April, 1980, Rawlins was dumped as a CSICOP Fellow (but not told in an official letter), was attacked in the pages of Skeptical Inquirer by Lawrence Jerome, the guy who had launched the affair in the first place (!). According to Rawlins, Martin Gardner told him that, due to Kurtz owning the CSICOP mailing list, that parliamentary rules were "crap"; i.e., there was a shitlist, and Rawlins was Name Number One. From this incident (which I again forcefully ask readers to click the link above, I am not doing the story justice) it seems Randi and Phil Klass got the idea into their heads that they were the "Defenders of The Faith" and were amenable to being the organization's dirty tricks men/inquisitors. But before we leave the 1970s we need to talk about the source of the infamous "blackmail tape" that surfaced repeatedly in the 1980s and 1990s.

The Origin of "The Tape"

By the early 1970s Randi had left Greenwich Village for Rumson, New Jersey and was living in a suburban house, a home that had a lot of young men coming and going through it. The story then was that Randi was "training magicians", which may have been true, but a number of these guys were possible hook-ups for Randi, who was living deeply in the closet. This situation drew the attention of a cop, Stephen Xanthos, of the Middlerown police department, a 54-officer force that liked stopping and searching cars at random in Monmouth County. The metaphorical head-butting between Randi and Xanthos was written up in the New York Times in 1973. The tape itself was allegedly leaked by Xanthos, but how he got it is unknown....literally the recording is an answering machine tape of calls into Randi's house; you can hear Martin Gardner calling in at the start, but that conversation is cut. The conversations that matter are between Randi and these young men looking for gay sex; they call him for meetings and all of them call Randi the pseudonym "Donald." There are seven of these conversations and this website has copy-pastes of transcripts of the 1995 Eldon Bird trial in which they were read into evidence in graphic detail, including .WAV files of the recordings. We don't know when these recordings were made, but it seems to be around the 1973-75 time period. Randi would not admit he was gay until 2010. This writer has a suspicion that Xanthos had sources in the Monmouth gay community, people he could pressure for information and that Randi's way of "doing business" irked him or his chief, a man named Robert Zerr. The tape had been circulating for years before the trial, some of it had been packaged up with other material and mailed anonymously to various people in 1998-99, which prompted Randi to write a long-winded note** to those recipients. The tapes were Randi's second Uri Geller.

The Early 1980s: Randi vs. Robert Anton Wilson; the MacLab follies

Randi's skeptical activities were well-known to the outside world. In mid-1980 High Times sent noted iconoclast/psychonaut/comedian/novelist/occultist Robert Anton Wilson to an American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting where Randi played Lavrenti Beria to the mere concept of Parapsychology. "The PERSECUTION And ASSASSINATION Of The PARAPSYCHOLOGISTS As PERFORMED By The INMATES Of The AMERICAN ASSOCIATION For The ADVANCEMENT Of SCIENCE UNDER The DIRECTION Of The AMAZING RANDI!" was part of their August issue and was later reprinted in the Wilson collection Right Where You Are Sitting Now: Further Tales of the Illuminati in 1982. The article has been deleted off the Internet, probably by RAW's estate, but I have read it and it's hilarious as it winds through this Dante's Inferno of worse-and-worse slamming by skeptics until you hit Randi, who acts like this bearded Fundamentalist preacher for the Scientific Method, because it was a panel discussion and Wilson, the press, and others were the audience. 

The "MacLab" story is a tale of degrees, according to Michael A. Thalbourne; his 23-page report for the Journal of the American Society of Psychical Research in October, 1995 ("Science versus Showmanship: A History of the Randi Hoax") is a good overview of the case and linked here. In short, James S. McDonnell, founder/chairman of the McDonell-Douglas aircraft corporation, had been fascinated with parapsychology as an undergraduate at Princeton in the 1920s, but had been convinced to remain an engineering student. By the 1970s he had an independent McDonnell Foundation and from 1975 to 1985, they had a parapsychology laboratory at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri ("MacLab.") In 1979, two teenagers and hobbyist magicians, Michael Edwards and Steven Shaw (now stage magician "Banachek") were sent in by Randi either through a cut out or claiming that they came by their own volition, none of it is clear to this writer. At the MacLab they claimed to be able to bend spoons

(post under construction)

* It's both the world labor holiday that America does not respect (May Day) and the traditional witches' sabbath of European legend (April 30th). Hitler blew his brains out on that date, ten days after his birthday.

** Let the rambleation commence!

May 3, 1999
To Whom It May Concern:
You are one of those persons who may have received a strange and uninvited
packet in the mail, purporting to deal with me and my history.

Documentation is contained in the packet that seems to indicate a
disgraceful series of events, a police record, arrests, and immoral,
illegal, behavior on my part. It claims that a recording contained in the
packet is of an officially-placed wiretap that was in operation on my phone
years ago, and that proves shameful actions that I performed at that time.

Taken as presented, this material might well have caused you to doubt my
character and validity. If this possibility has not occurred to you, I
apologize. The attached document is being sent to you and to a number of
others who have in some way participated with me and/or have supported me
or the James Randi Educational Foundation. The senders pf these packets
have been involved in a concerted effort to undermine our work, and rather
than attacking us directly, have chosen to stab us in the back.

I regret having to send you this material, but I think you'll understand
that there is no other way that I may hope to neutralize the damage this
campaign may have done to me and my cause. Any feedback you may wish to
provide to me would be welcome. I want you to be completely informed on
this matter, and I will do all I can to help you understand. I'm sure you
will relate to my dismay and concern, and I again express my regrets at
having to involve you in any way.

If you did indeed receive this material, I ask you to observe the request
at the bottom of the last page of the attached document. The Postal
Inspector involved needs as much material as can be assembled, and your
help is welcome. If you have not -- yet -- received the packet, I ask you
to be on the lookout for it. It is usually mailed from a location in the
USA, in a brown kraft-paper envelope measuring 4" by 6" and bearing a
paste-on label. The packet should be handled as little as possible and sent
as directed in the document. Thank you for any help you may offer in this
respect.

Sincerely,
James Randi

And here's the full document.....


A STATEMENT - CONCERNING THE ACTIONS OF
CERTAIN PERSONS DESIGNED TO DEFAME AND DISCREDIT THE NAME OF JAMES RANDI

April, 1999.
To Whom It May Concern:
In any battle, the character of the enemy is something that should always
be determined and evaluated. One can only hope to be facing an opponent who
at least respects the basic rules of human behavior. After reading this
account, I believe that you will have a better understanding of the quality
of my enemies. I believe that the old saw still holds: Truth will out. In
these few pages, you will learn to what lengths certain people have gone,
and to what depths they will sink in their desperation.

It is no secret that the undersigned has for many years been very actively
involved in investigations of paranormal claims. Some persons have believed
that I consider the parapsychologists and the "psychics"
to be my enemies; that is far from true. My real enemies are those who
would try to prevent a proper and complete investigation from taking place,
and would try to prevent the results from becoming known. Their motives for
such actions are varied. Many self-proclaimed "experts"
resent the fact that I have exposed their fumbling and their mendacity. The
performers of psychic trickery have feared that responsible persons would
awaken to recognize how they have been deceived. Both groups, cherishing
their small fantasies, would do much to see me silenced. This statement
will, I believe, expose the extent to which a certain group of my enemies
have gone to discredit me. It should shock and repulse responsible and
decent members of the media, the public and the academic world. I ask you
to note that I am preparing this statement as an independent individual,
and not on behalf of any organization or colleague with whom I am
affiliated. It is an action that I take with full knowledge of my liability
under the law and my personal responsibility for having absolute proof of
everything I state in this document. This statement is not made lightly,
nor will I retreat from one word of it. I have a certain reputation for
being able to support any statement I have ever made. Some have chosen to
doubt that fact, and have subsequently regretted that decision.

x x x x x x x x x x

It began when in February of 1983, NBC-TV broadcast a "special" about my
battle against the "psychics." Prominently featured in that program was Uri
Geller, a showman from Israel who claimed psychic powers and who was at one
time believed by some scientists to really have paranormal ability. Several
of his fans and supporters were also represented on that program, rather
unfavorably.

In July, an anonymous blackmail campaign was started against me. Packets of
defamatory material -- consisting of newspaper clippings, a fake "rap
sheet" and a cassette recording -- were mailed out to (initially) at least
30 members of the media, my neighbors, and my colleagues. The way it was
presented, and on first perusal, the material appeared to establish that I
was a person of very low character, and, in fact, a criminal. It was of
such a nature that it most certainly could damage my career and reputation,
regardless of the fact that the information contained in the packets
actually was either total fiction, carefully edited, and/or easily
explained. All that will be discussed in the following account. I have no
idea of how many packets were mailed out altogether, nor can I determine
just how effective this smear campaign was. Many persons I contacted denied
that they had ever received the blackmail material, though I know they did
receive it. More importantly, one letter addressed to me arrived from
Sweden -- at a time when the prime suspect was in Europe -- stating that
unless I ceased my investigative work, this material would continue to be
circulated. This letter brings the entire matter into the legal area of
blackmail. (More recently, the threat has been issued that unless the James
Randi Educational Foundation (JREF) pays out the million-dollar prize
before July 4, 1999, the writer will distribute the blackmail packet to
"thousands" of persons. This is a threat that I cannot afford to ignore.)

At the very onset of these events, I contacted the FBI office in New
Jersey, who turned the case over to the Postal Service Investigation
Department in Newark, New Jersey. Postal Inspector Ray Mack began work on
it which continues to this day. He presently has a mass of evidence on hand
that demonstrates the depth of this extensive effort to nullify my
effectiveness. Those newspaper clippings, far from being something I would
be ashamed of -- had they been available to the reader in unedited form --
detailed my battle against the police force of Middletown, NJ. A police
officer, Steven Xanthos, had illegally searched and physically assaulted
friends of mine, and I had brought the matter to the attention of the
public via meetings and press releases. (More about the eventual fate of
Xanthos, later in this document.) As a result, I was harassed almost every
time I drove through Middletown, was falsely arrested for fictitious
traffic offenses and equally false minor infractions of the law, until the
police there were satisfied that I was silenced. I paid many thousands of
dollars in legal costs to defend myself against these charges. But I was
not silenced. The tape cassette which formed part of the blackmail package,
rather than being the product of a "tap" on my phone, as the blackmail
package claimed, was a copy of a tape that I was specifically asked to make
back in 1968, by the police chief -- Zerr -- of Rumson, New Jersey, where I
lived at that time. That request was because of obscene phone calls I'd
been receiving at home, at all hours of the day and night. The object of my
conversations on that tape had been to keep the callers on the line and
thereby trace and identify the persons responsible. Zerr informed me that
though a recording could probably not be admitted into evidence, it would
be a powerful tool to possess. (At that time, to establish a trace, it was
necessary to keep a caller on the line a minimum of four minutes.) That
investigation resulted in a minor in a neighboring town being identified
and charged with the crime. At that time, the minor's lawyer was informed
by the local police that I possessed a recording of the phone calls. The
very next night, my home was broken into, and only my small reel-to-reel
tape recorder that had been connected to the telephone, was taken; no other
valuables were touched.

Police subsequently found the minor in possession of the recorder and its
tape reel, and he was then also charged with the break-in. The tape
recorder held the very tape that was subsequently given to officer Steven
Xanthos by the local Rumson police who investigated the break-in for me, in
an apparent show of police solidarity with the Middletown force.
(Subsequent to that event, in 1984, I was again similarly plagued by
similar calls, and the calls were traced, almost instantaneously this time
due to improved technology, to a teen-age girl who admitted the fact, but
that case did not go to court.) The young man who did go to court and was
convicted of both crimes, tried to later avenge himself on me by claiming
that my house was full of pornography -- a dreaded crime in those days. He
said he knew that because when he had broken into my house and stolen the
tape recorder from my office, he had observed an article on pornography in
my typewriter. That was true. That article was being prepared by me for
editor John Durniak of Popular Photography magazine, and it was a
lighthearted spoof on what different cultures -- and eras -- have believed
to be pornographic photography.

Steven Xanthos, then a senior police officer on the Middletown force
notorious for conducting illegal searches without "probable cause," set out
to do all he could to damage me. Thus, in March of 1983, when three men
showed up at the Middletown police department pretending to be conducting
an investigation for the Department of the Navy in Washington, DC, the
Middletown police chief, Joseph McCarthy, fell for the ruse and happily
turned them over to Xanthos, who was only too anxious to help them. They
said they were officially investigating James Randi. They were told
fanciful tales about orgies that I had conducted at my home with children,
shown pornographic photos that Xanthos said were of myself and a Haitian
friend (Martial Roumaine, of New York City, one of my friends who had been
harassed by Xanthos) and there was all sorts of information given them on
criminal activities that Xanthos said I'd been involved in. It was all
fiction.

Not long after this, passing through Middletown late at night on my way
back from New York City, I saw a car pulled over to the side of the highway
by officer Steven Xanthos. It was a "hippie" van, exactly the kind of
vehicle that Xanthos specialized in. He was inside, searching the van by
slashing up the seats and throwing everything out the door onto the road. I
approached the two terrified kids who were standing outside, and advised
them that they had rights, and that Xanthos would have to prove "probable
cause" elements other than their long hair and painted van, to be properly
stopping and searching them. Xanthos emerged from the van, flustered, and
yelled at me that I was "interfering with a police officer in the
performance of his duty." I left the scene after giving my phone number to
one of the kids.

Years later, I learned from that same kid that Xanthos had confiscated my
number from him. The next night, I was arrested by the Middletown police,
spent the rest of the night in a cell, and was released the following day.
I was then charged with "interfering with a police officer in the
performance of his duty,"
and was fined $100.

x x x x x x x x x x x x

Within a month, the blackmail campaign was started. Editors of newspapers
received packets. My neighbors began bringing them to me. I was called from
all over the country and told that this material was being sent everywhere.
By conservative estimate, hundreds of such packets were sent out, from
various postal districts around the USA, to domestic and foreign addresses.
Postal Inspector Ray Mack, as part of his investigation on my behalf,
visited the Middletown police department giving as his premise that he was
investigating me. That made them very co-operative.

Inspector Mack spoke with Chief McCarthy and with Officer Xanthos and was
given the whole pack of lies. He took with him two or more of the
pornographic photos, the source of which has never been established. But it
was established beyond question by Inspector Mack that those persons in the
photographs were neither James Randi nor Martial Roumaine, and in any case,
the photos were circa 1930. Of course, it was incredibly inept of the
Middletown police to allow themselves to be taken in by three characters
who claimed they were with the US government. But those police have never
been known as intellectual giants. Two of the men who carried out this
subterfuge were actually persons who were used as part of the NBC-TV
"special" program previously referred to. Since they had not come out too
well on that program, they had chosen this means of taking their revenge
and trying to neutralize me.

Unable to fight me with the facts, they had resorted to a method that has
been used before by desperate persons facing exposure as frauds,
incompetents or simple liars. The three men who showed up at the Middletown
police department to ask for "dirt" on James Randi were persons well-known
to those who follow the "occult" world. One is a performer, the other two
are merely followers. The first is former "psychic" star Uri Geller, and
the others are Eldon Byrd, a would-be parapsychologist who has contributed
much nonsense to the literature of pseudoscience, and Robert Warth,
publisher of a minor UFO newsletter. Byrd had used identification documents
he carried from a project he was then doing for the US Navy, to pose as an
investigator for that service.

The Middletown police accepted this ID as legitimate. Byrd was soon after
fired from that position when he was arrested, and he can never again hold
a federal job. (A few years ago, in California, I confronted a UFO fanatic
who had come into possession of the blackmail material. He'd written a
letter to the FBI and to a group of scientists in Los Angeles, repeating
the scandalous drivel he'd chosen to believe. In front of an audience
assembled to hear my lecture, I had the great pleasure of punching him out
-- to a standing ovation. But it's little satisfaction, considering the
damage that he and others like him, along with the principals, Geller,
Warth and Byrd, have done to me.) Blackmail -- defined as the actual
distribution of defamatory material accompanied by a threat of some sort of
physical, professional or financial damage -- is one of the most despicable
acts of mankind. And it is a crime. It tries to be an assassination of
reputation and character. It seeks to silence victims by frightening them
into submission. It is done in the dark, from the protection of anonymity.
It is a cowardly, detestable, malicious performance. I hope that you will
recall this account when next you consider those who have chosen me as a
target. And I hope that when critics of my work make comments on it, they
will remember this document. Further information on the matter is available
to responsible persons who ask. Those who have distributed the blackmail
packets have characterized the audio recording as a "tap" made on my
telephone by the police.

The fact that all the calls on that tape are calls made to me and not by
me, shows the true nature of the tape. The tape was made by me, at the
instruction of the Chief of Police of Rumson, New Jersey, for the purpose
of obtaining evidence on the night callers. A careful listening to the tape
establishes this beyond doubt. The distributors cite references that are
simply not on the tape, and they fail to mention its provenance.

The fake arrest record that is part of the packet, is ludicrous. I am shown
with a huge grin, holding a number on a piece of cardboard. That photo
resulted from an event in about the year 1963, when I had been taken "into
custody" by the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (I&NS), on a
technicality whereby I was required to physically leave the USA and was
then free to re-enter after 24 hours. This arose because I had "worked" for
an employer that was not listed on my work visa at that time. That was a
technical error, not on my part, but on the part of the I&NS, since I'd not
been paid, and was thus not actually employed. However, the I&NS officers
suggested that since I was scheduled to return to Canada anyway, and
already had my air ticket, it would be simpler to just go along with the
system and all would be resolved. I agreed. I was not incarcerated, I was
not accompanied to the airport, and I never heard anything more about the
matter. But the blackmailers dug up this dreadful "arrest record," and are
now holding it up as evidence of my perfidy and criminal history. It would
be well to relate another aspect of this matter that is powerful evidence
against the detractors. While I lived in New Jersey, I applied for American
citizenship. When the time came for my examination before the I&NS officer,
in which I knew I would be asked the usual questions about U.S. government
and history, I was hit with the question, "Have you ever been arrested?"
With some trepidation, I told the officer about both cases. He seemed
unmoved by both accounts, and said to me, "Mr. Randi, I lived in
Middletown, and your arrest there I consider to be a definite plus toward
your being granted citizenship." I was relieved. The officer continued.
"Now I have to ask you questions about the U.S. Constitution and system of
government." He paused, then looked up at me. "Mr. Randi, who was the first
president of the United States?" I rather saw the direction he was going,
and went along with it. "Richard Nixon?" I asked. "Ummm, no. But that's
close enough." He stood up, reached across his desk, and shook my hand with
a big smile. "Welcome to the United States of America, Mr. Randi."

Shortly thereafter, I was sworn in as a U.S. citizen in a hall in Newark,
New Jersey. I relate this event to show that my whole record was and is
known to the U.S. government, yet I was granted citizenship. Had there been
any truth to the horrendous canards that are presently being circulated,
that would not have happened. Furthermore, when the would-be
parapsychologist Eldon Byrd sued me in Baltimore a few years ago, his
lawyer brought up the famous tape recording as evidence against my
character. My own lawyer, at my insistence, asked that the entire tape be
played for the courtroom and jury, so that the true nature of the record
would be understood, instead of being misrepresented as it usually was. It
was played, and Postal Inspector Ray Mack, who followed this matter from
its inception, was a witness we brought in to validate the true nature of
the recording. His evidence was accepted by the jury, who then gave Eldon
Byrd zero of the four penalties he was demanding of me, totaling thirteen
million dollars. My detractors claim that at that trial, I was established
to be "a malicious liar," and that I was found guilty. The truth is that
(a) the term "malicious liar" was invented by Byrd's lawyer, and was not
any part of the jury's decision, and (b) I entered that courtroom having
already admitted that I did indeed make the statement about Eldon Byrd for
which he sued me, but that I did it based upon evidence supplied to me. I
was notconvicted of having made that statement; it was already part of the
record. I had said that Byrd was "a convicted child molester," while I
should have said that he was "an admitted child molester," a fact that was
developed during that trial -- though I was the defendant in the case! Byrd
had plea-bargained himself out of the original charge, settling for a
lesser charge and a summary judgement. This was unknown to me. In any case,
I certainly won that case, since I was represented pro bono most
efficiently, and paid Byrd not a nickel.

x x x x x x x x x x x
Now you know the actual facts behind the accusations. I cannot hope that
this document will receive the attention or the circulation given to the
scandalous fantasies that have been giggled over by so many for the last
sixteen years. Those who really know me simply refuse to believe what was
contained in the blackmail package, and also know that I would never, under
any circumstances, yield to such pressures. They also know that there is
nothing -- absolutely nothing -- in my life that cannot be known to anyone,
that can cause me to back away from my chosen work. I am my own person, and
always will be. The blackmailers cannot recognize that fact. I have felt it
necessary to issue this statement so that those who may have believed any
or all of the scurrilous attack that was committed against me, can have the
facts to consider, rather than the invented ravings that have heretofore
been circulated. I have no intention of softening my attacks on nonsense.
In a battle that I suspect I cannot win, I continue to fight. Perhaps -- is
it a futile hope? -- there will come a day when superstition, fear and
scientific illiteracy will no longer rule our minds. Then, perhaps I will
be vindicated. Until that time, I can only hope that those with whom I
disagree will at least agree to pursue their ends as responsible, honorable
persons. It is not too much to ask.