Charles Manson #3 - The Mamas And The Papas, Drug Deals and CIA men
Frykowski's shady friends
It’s Friday! On Fridays, I read a section from Tom O’Neill’s CHAOS - Charles Manson, The CIA, and the Secret History Of the Sixties.
This is a crazy book, that has a ton of research backing it, to make some pretty mindblowing assertions - that Charles Manson murders of actress Sharon Tate and friends was connected to CHAOS - the CIA program that was focused on eliminating hippie influence and sympathy and MK-ULTRA - a top-secret program that involved experimenting on American citizens without their knowledge to develop a method to convert an unsuspecting citizen into a killing machine, and then wipe their memories so they don’t know why or how they did it.
Previous pieces in this series:
The first piece introduces us to this book and its motivation - Film journalist Tom O’Neill is assigned in 1999 to do a piece on the 30th anniversary of the Manson murders. He starts digging, and finds that things are not as they seem.
The second piece goes into the Manson trial, and Tom O’Neill’s initial investigation. Vince Bugliosi, the prosecutor who got rich off of writing the most bestselling true crime book ever, about the Manson murders, inadvertently reveals that there was a missing videotape from the evidence. He had initially said that it was a sex tape of Sharon Tate and her husband Roman Polanski. But in 1999, he reveals that it was actually a tape of Sharon Tate being sexually abused by two unknown men, and Polanski was the one filming. This leads him to question what else was fake about the “well-established” facts of a famous, picked-over murder case.
Today, let’s follow Tom O’Neill as he tries to follow a rumor that the Tate murders could have been a drug deal gone bad.
Frykowski’s Shady Friends
The victims in the Tate murders included actress Sharon Tate, her friend and hairdresser to the stars Jay Sebring, the heir to the Folger Coffee fortune, Abigail Folger, and her boyfriend, Polish immigrant and aspiring writer Voytek Frykowski.
Within 24 hours of the murder, the cops got a tip that a friend of the victims was going around saying he knew who the murderers were and if he spoke up, he was going to be killed too.
The cops traced this to Witold Kaczanowski, who was an artist and also a Polish immigrant, who knew the Tate house crowd through his friend Frykowski. I checked him out, turned out to be a famous artist who passed away literally just a month ago.
The cops promised him they’d offer him 24/7 protection, and he agreed to speak up.
He said Frykowski was involved with unsavory characters who supplied the Tate house with drugs. One of them, Pic Dawson, had threatened to kill Frykowski publicly at a party. When Kaczanowski saw the ‘PIG’ written in blood, he thought it was actually ‘PIC’.
This meshed with something else the cops had heard - there had been a huge party at the Tate house several months ago, and there had been three gatecrashers who had behaved very aggressively, and Roman Polanski had kicked them out. These men were Billy Doyle, Tom Harrigan, and — Pic Dawson.
This lead in the original investigation didn’t lead anywhere. But this angle seemed interesting. Especially since many others agreed that when Sharon Tate and Roman Polanski had been away in Europe, Folger and Frykowski had the run of the place, and when Sharon Tate came back, the place was just stranger, and scarier.
Tom O’Neill sought out Kaczanowski.
When Kaczanowski talked about 1969, he reminisced about how everyone had an open-door policy, and markers of class and status had disappeared in Hollywood.
“Totally primitive, uneducated people” could dress and act like visionary artists. “And you couldn’t know absolutely who was who. You could have a Manson and you could have a great poet, and it was impossible to make a distinction.”
Kaczanowski stayed sometimes for days on end with Frykowski, and noticed there were “so many strange people” moving about the house freely. They were always introduced to him as a friend of a friend or someone who knows someone else.
Frykowski had told him about having thrown Pic Dawson out of a party, and at a different party a few weeks before the murders, he and Frykowski had thrown out a couple of drunk guys.
At the gate, “they were standing on the other side, looking at Voytek and me, and they said, ‘You sons of bitches, we will be back, and we will kill you.’”
Being around so many shady characters, several of them dealing drugs, when Frykowski was killed, Kaczanowski was sure one of the shady characters had killed him.
This was 30 years after the murder, and Kaczanowski was still wondering if Manson had been one of the shady characters in the house he’d met, and was wondering if the murders had been in revenge.
Tom O’Neill also got to know through Roman Polanski’s former agent that Polanski stayed in the Paramount Studio parking lot a lot, because that was the only place the LAPD weren’t surveilling him.
“…there was a kind of FBI-slash-CIA aspect of the Los Angeles Police Department, and they knew everything there was to know”.
Interesting…
The Mamas And The Papas And Uncle Tacot
Mr. O’Neill then looked up Pic Dawson - he was the son of a diplomat, and had been on an Interpol surveillance list for drug smuggling at least four years before the murder. Kaczanowski was right to have been worried.
Pic Dawson, along with Billy Doyle and Tom Harrigan, had been lovers of Cass Elliot a.k.a Mama Cass of The Mamas And The Papas, and had become friends with the Tate house crowd through her.
Well, I can’t think of The Mamas And The Papas without California Dreamin’ playing in my head, so here you go.
Mama Cass had actually been arrested in London in 1966 for stealing hotel towels - it’s always funny when celebrities act cheap. But it was said that it was actually a ruse to get her to implicate Pic Dawson for smuggling drugs. But only Billy Doyle was convicted, and even that conviction was overturned.
Along with Pic Dawson, Billy Doyle and Tom Harrigan was a fourth man - “Uncle” Charles Tacot. Tacot was a decade older, a former marine, 6’6”, skilled with knives, seemed to have connections to military intelligence…. and had been selling drugs in LA since the 1950s.
All of these people get mentioned in Bugliosi’s book, Helter Skelter, but they got pseudonyms.
I can’t find a picture of Charles Tacot. but looking for him online, I stumbled upon this bit in an article about musician Ned Doheny:
Nicole Tacot, daughter to Traffic manager Charles Tacot, had been a fixture in the Hollywood Hills since her teens and would be Doheny’s chaperon during his time abroad.
{….} Mason was coming off a career high in 1970’s Alone Together; Elliot had recently departed the Mamas and the Papas and was in the bosom of a successful solo career; Doheny was the dreamy oil-dynasty heir with emerging chops. Traffic’s management team of Charles Tacot and Billy Doyle were brought in to handle the trio’s day-to-day.
Traffic is a British band. Its founding member, Dave Mason, has collaborated with Mama Cass on an album.
When I google for Nicole Tacot, I find she was married to a British musician Steve Winwood, then that her biological daughter is looking for her (yikes), and she threw a party for Pattie Boyd after she divorced Eric Clapton. Like…. just how far do these connections go?
When you Google for news articles from the 1960s about these musicians, the same people keep coming up again and again - Candice Bergen, Terry Melcher, Mama Cass, Roman Polanski, and all these associated people. At the very least, they were all a loosely-knit gang.
At some level, it does seem like the Feds had infiltrated the film and music world.
Funnily, Michael Caine remembers being introduced to Charles Manson at a party by Mama Cass:
Actor Michael Caine also remembers it well. In his autobiography, he recalled a night spent at a party with Mama Cass, Tate and her hairdresser Jay Sebring, who was also murdered by the cult. The party would have been nothing to write home about if it wasn’t for the recollection of being introduced to a person he described as a “scruffy little man”. That was Charles Manson.
I’m not sure Mr. Tom O’Neill was aware of this at that point, though it seems like Michael Caine’s memoir came out in 1992.
But there was another incident everyone talked about that added to the “revenge” motive.
The SA motive
There was a famous story doing the rounds, that in one of the parties at the Tate house, months before the murder, Billy Doyle showed up, and he passed out from the partying, as one did in the ‘60s.
Frykowski, Jay Sebring, and possibly Kaczanowski, all wanted to get even with Doyle for something - possibly selling them a bad batch of drugs. In front of everyone, they took of his pants, flogged him, and then SA’d him.
Many different people confirm this story. The part that’s interesting about this is, if there was large-scale drug use here, and that was how everyone was connected to everyone else, and there were people connected with military intelligence here, this could mean the real motives were covered up.
LAPD had investigated this angle, and talked to Billy Doyle. He said he didn’t know if it had happened, but he did admit to being doped with mescaline in his champagne and some other drugs that led to him being passed out.
This bit sounds straight out of Seinfeld:
It didn’t help that he often bragged about how much cocaine he had, especially when there were women around.
“They all wanted to get laid,” he said to Deemer, “and the price of admission was a nose full of coke, and I learned that.” He would show up at parties with a silver coke spoon and tell everyone he had “pounds of it.”
His good friend Charles Tacot said, “‘For Chrissakes, Billy, what do you tell people that kind of stuff for?’
And I said, ‘I want to get laid, Charles.’”
What Doyle confirmed to the cops was that at some point, he got paranoid on drugs, convinced that Frykowski was going to hurt him. He pulled out his gun and pointed it at him threatening to kill him. Frykowski took the gun away from him.
He then passed out, and Frykowski called Charles Tacot to come pick him up.
This is obviously a stronger motive to brutally murder people as had happened in the Tate house, so Mr. O’Neill started trying to track down all these people.
Tacot might have known Manson?
Tom O’Neill tracked down Charles Tacot. He was old and in a nursing home.
He confirmed that he had taken Billy Doyle home, to Mama Cass’s house. When Doyle awoke, he was angry, and said he was going to shoot Frykowski. Tacot feared Doyle would actually do it, and then took him on a trip to Jamaica, where they were apparently making a movie about marijuana. Some others suggested though, that they were there for a drug deal.
They remained there when the murders took place. The cops were onto them pretty quick, and brought them back for interrogations and lie detector tests, which cleared them. Besides, they had a clear alibi- they were out of the country.
Would Billy have contracted out the killing, Mr. O’Neill wanted to know.
“No, he would have taken all the pleasure himself,” Charles Tacot confirmed.
Tacot then swore he didn’t know Charles Manson at all, and had never met him. And he said he had never sold drugs to anyone in the Tate house, and he was there strictly to tell people if the drugs they were taking were safe, and because Billy Doyle wanted to meet girls.
But then, Mr. O’Neill spoke to Corrine Calvet, who was a French actress who had worked in Hollywood since the ‘40s.
Corrine Calvet made a startling revelation - Charles Tacot had brought Charles Manson and his girls to a party at her house. Manson peed in her pool, and she asked Tacot to take them out, and they left.
Then she adds that the FBI came to her after the murders and said she was next on their list to be murdered.
She also can’t recall specifics, like dates, times, or years, and the list thing sounds out of left field and unreliable, especially since at this point, Mr. O’Neill thought only the LAPD had been investigating this case.
Charles Tacot’s daugher Margot (who I looked up, and she’s 67, and #opentowork on Linkedin… times are tough) confirmed to Mr. O’Neill that her father had indeed been a drug dealer, and had been arrested often, but nothing stuck, because “someone always took care of it for him”.
Mr. O’Neill decides to try getting Charles Tacot to lower his guard and talk to him, and started visiting him at his nursing home.
Spoiler - They were all CIA
Charles Tacot was in a wheelchair, but still had a sharp mind and bossy manner, and threatened Mr. O’Neill at one point - “I could have you hurt — or killed!”
He denied knowing Charles Manson at all, and said he had sued the LA Times for announcing him as a suspect.
But… once he got comfortable, Charles Tacot said something shocking - He worked for an unnamed intelligence agency, and reported to Hank Fine, “an assassin who shot people for the government”.
Hank had been in the Military Intelligence Service - a WW2 op that was so secret that the government hadn’t even acknowledged it until 1972. I looked this up, and it was a group that specialized in translating comms from Asian theaters in WW2 - Japan and Philippines.
He also said that the reason Bugliosi had given him a pseudonym in Helter Skelter was because “He was afraid American intelligence would kill him if he exposed us”.
Yikes.
When looked up, Hank Fine turned out to be real. He was a Polish immigrant working in movie PR as a cover, and had been in the OSS which had evolved into the CIA. He seemed to be sending Hollywood stars on undercover missions for the CIA.
Billy Doyle talked more. He agreed that they did go to Jamaica, but the marijuana movie was a cover for CIA work aimed to “keep Cuba out of Jamaica.”
He also believed Roman Polanski and Frykowski were “Polish spies”, with Polanski “subverting American democracy with his decadent films”.
He totally denied selling drugs or carrying drugs or trafficking them at all, and said Corrine Calvet was lying for attention and he didn’t know Manson at all.
He confirms though that the FBI had been involved - he said the FBI had asked him if he knew Manson.
A haircut, the CIA, and… the Mob?
Mr. O’Neill got a tip to talk to “Little” Joe Torrenueva, who had been an 18-year-old apprentice barber under Jay Sebring, another of the victims. Now, he himself was a “barber to the stars”.
Sebring had been the first apparently, to style men’s hair than simply cut it, and had been quite famous. He had charged $25 for a haircut, which was an obscene sum then, because it usually cost $1.50 or less then.
Little Joe said Sebring had been involved with the Mob in Chicago and Vegas. After the murders, Little Joe had gotten a call from Charlie Baron, a mobster, saying “Don’t worry, Little Joe, you’re going to be alright” and “You didn’t do anything to anybody. Nobody’s going to do anything to you.” Mind, this was before the cops had any idea who did it.
Did the Mob know who had committed the murders?
Apparently Charlie Baron was very close to Jay Sebring, and had “some type of security-intelligence clearance with the federal government”. I looked on Wikipedia, and apparently Charlie Baron was the first to open a casino in Cuba. That… tracks, doesn’t it?
And one of his friends, Little Joe Said, was General Curtis LeMay, who had been chief of staff of the US Air Force under Kennedy and Johnson. He had even tried to coup Kennedy during the Cuban Missile Crisis and bomb the Soviet bases in Cuba. I looked this guy up, and his set of nicknames is… something - “Bombs Away Lemay” is one. “The Demon” is another. “The Big Cigar” is suggestive.
So, Sebring had been operating with some big operators, and possibly was in over his head. Plus, despite charging sky-high prices for haircuts and having a product line, he lost a lot of money, and had trouble with barbers unionizing. And, he had also been known to shoot people.
It felt like at least two of the victims were highly involved with dangerous people that might want them dead, and powerful enough to scrub any evidence or police reports that might implicate them.
But yet — there was no concrete connection to Manson.
Processing all that…
The threads that stick out to me the most are - Polish-Americans, their connection with the CIA, and Hollywood.
The CIA, and really, the upper echelons of American establishment, seem to have been worried about Communists, African-Americans, Hippies, and Hollywood. I’m not sure how much they had infiltrated the first two, but they had certainly infiltrated Hollywood, telling them what movies to make, how to market them, and keeping an eye on everything that was happening. And we’ll see how they were infiltrating hippies too the same way in future pieces.
I suppose they were acutely aware of how powerful Hollywood was as a force for America and wanted to keep it so. They literally had Hollywood stars executing CIA ops. They didn’t want Hollywood celebrities to be supportive of the Black Panthers or of Communism. McCarthyism had tried to get rid of the communism in Hollywood.
I don’t quite know about the relationship between Poland and America, but I’m sure they had spies from all over the world holed up in America, and spies in every immigrant group. It certainly did make sense that the Poles would find Polanski’s home comfortable when they were trying to make it in Hollywood.
The movie business seemed like a meeting point of the best and worst impulses of society, and this group in particular seemed close to too many scary people. This is the vibe that had made everyone uncomfortable and made several people say the folks in the house brought the murders upon themselves.
It’s also interesting that CIA agents were involved in selling drugs right from after WW2. I don’t know much of the history of this, but I’m sure there’s probably something stemming right from the opium wars.
Why was Charles Tacot managing British rock groups in the ‘60s? What else did he do there? Were drugs involved? Were the Beatles and Rolling Stones also penetrated by the CIA? He and his associates seem to have had no fear of the police. They clearly had the protection of their agencies.
This is the sort of stuff that gets you all interested. But it doesn’t lead anywhere. There’s never any smoking gun that confirms things for you. All we can have is conjecture, but that, like my wondering about the Beatles here, leads to confusion and overwhelm.
Next Week…
I’m not sure I’ll be able to write this stuff next week TBH, I have too much going on. But the next edition of this, whenever I write it, will involve
The Beach Boys
Manson wanted to become a singer!
Dennis Wilson, the drummer of the Beach Boys said to his authorized biographer “I know why Charles Manson did what he did. Someday I’ll tell the world. I’ll write a book and explain why he did it.
Tom O’Neill finds clingy, desperate sources whose life has been destroyed by the Manson murders.
He also finds sources who stalked members of the Manson family.
It promises to be exciting. Tune in, same time, same substack!