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Hey, everyone. It's Josh here. For this week's Select, I've chosen our July 2019 episode on the Move bombing. It's a very disturbing, little known event in American history when the Philadelphia Police Department dropped a firebomb onto a row home where a radical group was hold up, about half of whom were children. It ended as anyone would expect in terrible tragedy. I hope you get a lot out of this episode.

Welcome to stuff you should know, a production of iHeartRadio.

Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh. There's Chuck. There's Josh. Got to get used to this, Chuck. We will eventually. It's the new normal. Yeah. This is stuff you should know. The I Can't Believe This Happened edition. One of many.

One of Yeah. This sparked off a lot of ideas, too.

Oh, yeah?

Yeah.

How the fillies work? No.

What's up with the Philly fanatic?

That's the green one, right?

Yeah.

That's a great character.

Sure.

Let's dispense with all that, okay?

Yeah, this is going to be a long one, so let's just jump in. Okay.

Back in 1985, in May, Philadelphia Police Department became the First, and to this point, only police department to drop a bomb on American soil. No police department has ever bombed anything in the history of America, but they did. And they happened to bomb a house that was occupied at the time with 13 people, seven of which were children. And the people in this house were members of an organization called MOVE, M-O-V-E, all caps, but it's not an acronym. And they We did this because MOVE had made themselves quite a nuisance in the neighborhood, to say the least. And there was basically, by this time in May 1985, a bitter feud between Move and the Philadelphia Police Department. On May 13th, it came to a fiery and tragic end.

That's a nice setup.

Thank you.

You should have music playing or something.

Thank you. Hopefully, Josh will do that because God knows, Gerri is not going to. She's not anywhere, anywhere, knows where she is.

You want to go back in time and talk a little bit about Move and their origins and then go forward in time? I would like to. Isn't that what you said? Mm-hmm. Okay. Move is still around. At times over the years, they've been called a cult. They've been called a Black Liberation Movement. Back to Earth. A terrorist group.

Animal Rights Group.

There are all these things to a certain degree here and there. Although the leader, one Mr. Vincent Lepart, who everyone, by the way, if you hear us say the name so and so Africa, once you become a member of Move, you take on the last name of Africa, which even though they weren't strictly a group for African-Americans, they had white people early on.

And Puerto Rican, too.

They definitely got that wrap a little bit more because of the Black Power Movement and the fact that the leader was Black, changed his name to Africa, and asked everyone else to change their last name to Africa. Although not legally, I don't think.

No, but ultimately it was... Well, they wouldn't have done it legally because that's part of the system. That's right. The system was one of the things they were real against. There were basically two prongs to John Africa's philosophy. One was that basically all life is important and equally important. So there was a lot of animal rights stuff. There was a lot of not eating meat ostensibly.

Was there vegetarianism in there?

There was, although they weren't strict vegetarians. No, they But yes. But there was animal rights and protection in the sanctity of life. And then the second was that the system, as they called it, was inherently flawed because everything that was created by humans was flawed, and therefore not only should not be used, but the whole system should be taken down and replaced with a much more natural animalistic philosophy and way of life.

Yeah. So that includes electricity. That includes cooking meat. These kids ate raw chicken, believe it or not.

Yeah, the kids who were raised in the move movement.

This story would make a lot more sense if this was on some desserted island and someone was moving there to start this utopian society on an island. This is a very interesting story in that it happened in a densely populated area of row houses in West Philadelphia. Born and raised. Not where you would...

I can't not think of that whenever I hear West Philadelphia.

I thought of it, too. When you go back and look at the footage, and by the way, there's a great documentary called Let burn, let the Fire Burn, that you should pay for online.

I did. That's good. On Amazon Prime.

Well, I'm a prime member.

So am I. Still had to pay to rent it, though, because Amazon is part of the system.

That's right. Where was that going?

You were saying that it would make more sense on a desserted island than it would in a densely populated neighborhood in Philadelphia.

Yeah. So when you're watching this documentary and there's so much footage, it's crazy to see this house, this row house, set up with farm animals at times in the front yard, heavily finced in.

Fortified like a fortress?

Yeah. Sometimes people standing outside with guns, even though, as we'll see later, these guns were later found out to be not capable of firing bullets, which means, well, I guess it's still a gun, but it means it's not a weapon. It's a club. Yeah,. But at the very least, it's an odd setting for this story.

It is. And when you watch that documentary, that house sticks out like a sore thumb.

They had Amish people probably an hour and a half away from this doing the same thing out in the middle of the country. Not the exact same thing, but you know what I'm saying.

But you can't get a good cheese steak in Amish country.

Much less a good raw one.

You can get good stick candy because they know what they're doing with that stuff.Nice furniture.

Butter.

Sure.

What was it? Rum springa, where they get to go crazy or whatever and see if they want to live the Amish life?

I think that was it.

That was a good one.

That was a long time ago. But anyway, it's a very interesting setting for this story. It got caught up in or maybe unfairly pegged as Black Liberation, like I said, but because of the time. And in which it happened, which was in the '70s and early '80s when the Black Panther Party was in power. There was a former Black Panther that later would join the move movement.

Yes, but from what I saw in the documentary, that person was interviewed, and he makes it sound like rather than bringing the Black Panther ideas to move- That's why he left.

He took on moves ideals rather than the...

Discarded the Black Panther's ideas.

Yeah, I think he was disillusioned with the Black Panthers because of the violence. It should be pointed out that Africa's whole thing was... His whole thing was nonviolence, but it wasn't like that was at the forefront of his everyday talkings because they very aggressively and very obscenely blasted their message through these loudspeakers attached to this row house, which was a real problem in this neighborhood for everyone, this black neighborhood. They didn't want them there either. No, that's- Don't drop a bonum on them, which is what one of them being interviewed very clearly was like, We didn't want this to happen, but they were a threat to our well-being here in the neighborhood.

Yeah, and they were also deliberately provocative. They purposefully made a nuisance out of themselves because part of Mouv's philosophy was waking everybody else up and doing it in a really aggressive, hostile, threatening way. Supposedly, some neighbors reported that they were directly threatened by this group, which is a big problem, too. I mean, that's definitely a couple steps up from agitating or aggravating people. Threatening them is different.

Sure. But at the very least, imagine being a neighbor who has lived in this house for 20 years, and all of a sudden there's this organization living there. And at 3:00 in the morning, it's just blasting out these MFers that are in charge or F in this and F in that. I felt sorry for these citizens. Oh, Yes. There's a lot of empathy to be dispersed among many parts of this story.

Yes, but this story also... Basically, this story has two types of people in it, villains and innocents.

Yeah, sure.

That's virtually who... There's one hero that you can point to, and he doesn't even appear in this article. He was in the documentary, which we'll talk about him for a minute later. But it's mostly just the adults acting badly. And the children or the people in the neighborhood who are innocent bystanders or ponds in this whole thing.

Victims, for sure. For sure.

Because when you're talking about blaring your philosophy in a very hostile, foul-mouthed way, if you see the pictures of the house, those loudspeakers that they have at stock car races or whatever, that's what they had posted out on the house. It wasn't just some guy with a bullhorn or like that walkie-talkie thing that Homer Simpson had at the Yard Sale episode.

No, you can hear this along the whole block in every direction. Yes.

And if you were anywhere near them, if your house was next door or even a couple doors down, You heard them night and day, and that was a real problem.

Yeah. So we should back up a little bit and give a little bit of the background here. Before the 1980s happened and they moved into the second house on Osage Avenue, 6221, they lived at a different house in the late '70s, and there was a different mayor in Philadelphia at this time, Mayor Rizzo, who was a- Scumbag. Tough talking like- Scumbag. Yeah.

He was a scumbag. I'm just going to say it. He was. I saw archival footage of the man, and he was a strong man scumbag.

Yeah, he was one of these guys, and we'll see what happened here. He was not in charge anymore, but it was remnants from that attitude, basically, that he laid down in the city, which is like- He was in charge in '78, though. Oh, yeah. I'm talking about the bombing. In '78, there was a standoff with the police. We had talked about the guns earlier. It was later found out that these guns weren't capable of firing. They didn't know that at the time. But at the very least, the cops overreacted at the declaration of Mayor Rizzo, and there was a shooting. There was an officer that was shot and killed, and it was just a really bad scene.

So even just a little bit before that, too, there was a confrontation between Mouv and the Philadelphia police, where one of the Mouv members' babies, a two-month-old, died.

And the Mouv member said, The cops did this.

This baby died from this confrontation with the police. So that kicks that off. The police eventually raid the move house in 1978, and one of the officers gets shot and killed in this raid. And so you've got some real bad blood brewing between these two groups.

Yeah. And during that raid, Delbert, Africa, one of the members was, and you can see the footage of this, it was all captured on camera, just beaten on the street while laying on the sidewalk by these cops.

While he was surrendering?

Yeah. So to say that there was bad blood is an understatement. You had on one side what you could at least define as a public nuisance in this neighborhood. You had on this other side this zealous mayor who just wanted to get rid of them, period. Not like, let's meet, let's talk, let's see if we can all work together. They were 100,000% at odds with one another.

The police officer that died, the move side said, We didn't shoot that guy. It was friendly fire that got him. The Philadelphia Police Department didn't agree with that story. And so on a personal level, not just an organizational level, but to a cop, the cops hated move. And these people just continued on in Philadelphia and actually stepped up there making themselves a public nuisance because nine of their members were arrested for the murder of that police officer.

And convicted.

Yes, and sent to jail for decades.

Yeah, 30 to 100 years is what they're each sentenced for. We'll talk about what happened to them toward the end.

So just to just paint this one last stroke on this picture we're painting here. The cops had a vendetta against Move because one of their own was killed during the siege. And Move had a vendetta against the cops because nine of their people were put in jail. One of them was beaten, and a baby had died on their side.

Okay? All right, let's take a break, and we'll come back right after this and talk more about what happened in 1985.

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All right, so whether or not this was a cult is... Some people debate that. John Africa is very much on record saying it's an organization.

Is that relevant?

I don't think so.

I don't either. I think it's just an attempt to discredit them.

Oh, to call them a cult? Yeah, I don't know. I think it's all we're talking about, though.

Oh, yeah. I'm not criticizing you or anything that. I'm just saying when people toss it around, oh, they were a cult. Yeah, there were some characteristics that you could say, well, it's cult-like or whatever.

Let's put it this way. If it was on a deserted island, then I think people would have straight up called them a cult. The fact that it was in a neighborhood in West Philadelphia made it seem a lot less so.

I hear you.

But if he was like, Come here and live on this island with me, then it would have straight up been called a cult.

Let me rephrase what I was saying. I don't dispute that they may have been a cult. But again, it's that, well, does that mean that they should have had a bomb dropped on them?

I don't think anyone thinks that.

Okay.

Like I said, there were kids there that were forced to eat raw fish raw chicken. The adults could cook their meat, which was there were definitely some double standards going on there. Their rationale was that our bodies are used to this, but we want to raise you pure from the start, so you're only going to eat raw foods.

Yeah, they had a lot of exceptions, not just that. Like the anti-technology thing where they had a wood burning stove for heat and that was it. Right. No, they used candles instead of light bulbs, that stuff. But they also had phones, and they drove cars. Right. So there was a lot of weird exceptions and loopholes and holes in general in John Africa's guidelines, as he called them.

Yeah. As for one of the more... Well, the only child that survived this experience, Birdie Africa, Michael Ward. He said, 1995, I'm still afraid of them, of move, some of the things that went on there. I can't get out of my head. Bad things, I haven't told anyone except for my father. But I'll tell you this, I didn't like being there. They said it was a family, but a family isn't something where you're forced to stay and you don't want to. His contention was that the kids were always trying to get out of there and run away.

They were just too little to know how.

Too little and naked.

They were naked. They were malnourished. The only toys they had, they had to hide because they weren't supposed to have them because it's technology and human made.

It was unsanitary.

Yeah. Part of what Mouv was into is growing their own food. So they would compost in the alley behind the house or on the roof or something like that. They built an animal shelter in the alley. So there was a lot of really not okay conditions to raise kids in, let alone adults to live in. But raising children, there were some really bad decisions and choices or bad outcomes from some of John Africa's philosophy.

Yeah, it's weird because at the heart of this, it's this back to nature movement. You want them to be on a dessert island so bad. Not even a dessert island. Like, go out to... There's countryside not too far outside of Philadelphia. It is a little weird. It is It's very strange because on one hand, I'm like, yeah, this animal rights group, and they're back to nature, and they're issuing the things of man, but they're doing it in the most aggressive, antagonistic way possible in the middle of a city. It's like, I didn't know what to think about any of this, except obviously, you don't go in there and firebomb the place. That's the one thing I was clear on. You don't start a war in the middle of a neighborhood.

It's true.

Which is what happened, basically. The neighbors wanted to move out. They filed a bunch of complaints over the years to get them shut down. The city didn't really know what to do at this point. At this point, there was a different mayor, Mayor Good. This was the first Black mayor of Philadelphia.

Who actually was elected on this reform ticket, basically, to get rid of Rizzo, get rid of the corruption, the racism that Rizzo and his administration had fostered. Because he was police chief first and then became mayor.

Who Good was or Rizzo?

Rizzo. Sure. Basically, after that 1978 raid, there's footage of him just basically hopped up and boasting about how military the Chicago PD was now. I think he actually said- He said, We're ready for war. Yeah, we could go down to Cuba and take them if we wanted to right now, just really boasting about this. Not like, Oh, man, this is a tragedy or whatever, however you want to say it. He was boasting, Come on, who's next? Kind of thing. And this was the mayor at the time. So Wilson Good comes along and is like, not that. We're going to take a different tact here and try to promote more unity. And he was actually pretty successful in a lot of ways in that respect. As far as the city officials go, I really like Mayor Good because he took responsibility for it. Even stuff he didn't do. Just because he was the mayor, he put himself in as accountable.

All right, so should we fast forward? Yes. The stage is set. We know it happened in the '70s. We know the relationship between this neighborhood with this group this group with this city, and the cops. And so they decide that they are going to extract every person from that house. That was the plan, as we are going to remove the move organization from the house on Osage Avenue. In this article, it says they didn't have a plan. That's not true. They had a plan that just was not executed well and went really pair-shaped, really fast, and then they didn't have a plan. But the original plan was The Move organization had built this pretty fortified bunker on top of their building. As far as homemade bunkers go, not bad, which gave them a supreme tactical advantage. If you know anything about war, higher ground is always going to win out. Sure.

Or if you're going to have a designed a castle or something, you know. Sure.

Castle designers. Right. They know. Or mongers. The idea was to create a diversion on the roof, in which time police officers or SWAT and everybody would go inside and forcibly remove people by any means necessary in Mayor Goods' words.

But the first part of that was water canons and tear gas. You're right. And they were very surprised when these water cannons that were just, I think they shot like a thousand gallons a second or some crazy amount of water.

They just left them on.

Yes, two of them. And they fully expected to basically take most of this house down. It was a brick row home, but they expected it to take the non-brick parts off, including that structure on top, that lookout. And they were very, very surprised when two things didn't happen. When that structure didn't come down despite the water cans being directed at it for hours and the people not coming out despite tear gas being shot into the house. That is, like you said earlier, when they're playing went to the... Birds? Yeah.

Toilet? Sure.

Went down the toilet and they said, Well, what do we do now? Our whole plan doesn't work. I've got an idea. Let's start shooting at the house instead.

Yeah. So what they didn't know this whole time was that they were all hiding in a basement garage. So all of this water raining down on the roof, I probably wouldn't even getting to them. Probably not. Or maybe it's not like they were up to their necks in water in the basement and like, drowning or anything like that.

No, but they later said that the tear gas was everywhere. Sure. But apparently it wasn't potent enough. Yeah. Maybe they use expired stuff. We should step it back one step, Chuck. Before this raid actually started. They went house to house to the neighbors and said, You guys grab all your clothes. That's huge. We need you gone for 24 hours because we're about to do what you guys have wanted us to do for years. We're going to do it. So you need to get out here. They towed trucks from Osage Avenue.

They towed every car. They had the gas shut off, the electricity shut off. There was a siege. Yeah. They basically tried to just vacate the block. Yeah, and they did. Yeah, and they did. I think some people stayed when they shouldn't have. But it's like with any evacuation, they got as many people out of there as possible. They're like, You'll be back in your house tomorrow.

Okay, so the whole block, in a couple of blocks, a couple of streets on either side, are cleared. The water has been used. It's not working. The tear gas is not working. So supposedly, the first shots came from the house. But everybody, all witnesses, cops, firefighters, news people, say that the first shots were automatic fire. It's been conclusively proven that no one in the move house had an automatic weapon. If the first shots were automatic, then that means the cops fired first. That's what people seem to believe is that the cops started this.

Yeah, and a lot of this documentary, it's really compelling because it's footage from the commission afterward, and you get the real deal testimony, first-person testimony from all the major players, including the police chief. What was his name?

Gregory Sambor.

Yeah, Sambor. He identified it as automatic... His sworn testimony said it was automatic weapons, and they were like, Well, how do you know? And he was like, I know what an automatic weapon sounds like.

They were like, Well, what move didn't have automatic weapons? He's like, I don't know about that. Yeah.

He's like, I don't know how to explain that then. But they fired first. He just stuck to his guns every single time. Yeah.

He was a piece of work himself. He was definitely in the cut from the same cloth as Mair Rizzo.

I think so. So they decide to start shooting at this point because regardless of who shot first, it becomes like Vietnam on the city block all of a sudden. And it's not like... I mean, they cleared it out. But when you see this news footage, I mean, there's people everywhere watching. There are news cameras and anchors everywhere on the streets like, Oh, we should get behind the car now because it's raining bullets everywhere. It's just freaky to see this happening on a city block in the United States. Yeah, the cops.

In the '80s. The cops later on estimated that they fired about 10,000 rounds.

They ran out of bullets.

Yeah, they had to bring in more because they ran out of bullets. That was a great part. Yeah.

This car pulls up and you're like, A police car has just rushed into the scene, and it's like from a movie, the trunk pops and it's just full of bullets.

Yeah, just because they ran out of bullets. So they kept shooting at this house. And here's the thing, bear in mind, they're shooting 10 1,000 rounds of ammunition at a house occupied by 13 people, seven of which are children. Everyone knows. Oh, yeah. Everyone knows that there were seven children in that house.

Yeah, it's not like the cops were unaware.

No. Everyone knew that there were children in this house. Yeah, for sure. It was part of it. It was part of the concern of the neighbors that there were children being raised in this house. And the cops acted on the information from confidential informants who fully informed that there were children in this house. So that's step one. They fired 10,000 rounds at a house where they knew that there were seven children.

All right, so nothing is changing, though. They're still not bringing people out of this house.

I bet they were like, I can't believe this. And that structure was still intact on top.

I'm surprised they didn't think they were dead. I would have thought at some point they would have been like, Well, I'm sure we probably killed everyone. Let's just go in there.

Yeah, I wonder because if they were all crowded down in the basement garage, they couldn't have been firing back after a certain point in time.

Yeah, I'm not sure. They said part of the problem was the tear gas, so they couldn't send cops in there because it was flooded with tear gas. And then I think they said the... Well, no, This comes later, the steam. So put a pin in the steam. At some point, someone on the bomb squad, apparently, says to the police chief, or it gets to the police chief, Hey, the chief was really worried about that bunker and that tactical advantage. So someone from the bomb squad said, Why don't we drop a bomb on the roof and get rid of that bunker?

Yeah, an officer named William Klein suggested.

And they said, Okay, let's do that.

Good idea, Klein.

What do we need? A helicopter and a bomb? Yeah. They're like, Well, we've got both.

So even as late as the inquiry that they held, they characterized it as a Tovex bomb. And Tovex is a water-based, gelatinous explosive that is used, I think, in mining and demolition and stuff like that.

But it can be purchased. Yes.

It later came out that in addition to the Tovex, the bomb disposal guy made a bomb with C4, Plastic Explosives, which is not commercially available, which means that we'll see later, the Philadelphia Police Department should not have had this stuff.

We should just go ahead and say how they got it. Why not?

Well, I was trying to save it with a little flair for the dramatic, but you go ahead.

Well, the FBI gave it to them. Secretly? Yeah, the FBI had been giving little bits of C4 here and there to police departments, apparently, to blow doors off of stuff.

To train bomb sniffing dogs?

Yeah, teach them how to use it. But then the FBI used that excuse for a little while, then later came out and said, No, we actually brought them a bunch of C4.

Like 30 blocks of C4 in January, a few months before this raid, this siege, but still during the time when the move people were being negotiated with to leave on their own.

Yeah, because that was happening this whole time. They would have community leaders on the bullhorn trying to talk them into coming out. They did not have a professional negotiator on the scene. No.

That's a huge red flag.

Yeah, that they never meant for anyone to come out.

Yeah.

But at any rate, they drop a bomb. I think it was, they We had a four-pound bomb from a satchel with a 45-second fuse. This is all on camera. You literally in this documentary, see the helicopter fly over, drop this satchel out of it.

And go... Yeah, fly.

I love that you did a running motion in helicopters run. Sure. They flew out of there and kaboom. In West Philadelphia, a bomb explodes on top of a building and a smallish fire starts. This is at what time?

There was like five that they dropped the bomb, 5:10, I think. All right. The smallish fire, it took a couple of minutes for it to become apparent that it had caught fire. But supposedly there was gas Gasoline in the... What are we calling that thing?

The bunker.

The bunker? Yeah. There's supposedly gasoline in the bunker. But the police dropped a bomb on a building that they knew that people were in, seven of which were children. Supposedly, the reason that they did this was to get rid of that bunker. The police chief did not like that bunker standing still and wanted to get rid of it. The bomb didn't do anything to the bunker. That was a strong bunker.

It was. The timeline is important. So at 5:27 is when they dropped the bomb. At 5:45, someone asked the fire department if they should turn on They've been delusional this thing with water all day long until there's a fire, and then they turn it off. Which was not ironic because it was very purposeful, but it definitely stings more. So they said not to turn them on. By 6:00, so this is 33 minutes later, Mayor Good is watching this on TV in his office. He phones it in and says, Let's put this fire out now.

He ordered the fire to be put out.

Yeah, 33 minutes later. This is where it gets a little hinky because this was given to Police Chief Sam Bor. Under testimony, Sam Bor says that he relayed that to the fire chief.

He said that the fire chief was there. He did not say he related to the fire chief.

Well, yeah. I mean, he got very dodgy with how he worded it. But the fire chief, basically on testimony, said, That's what he said? And he's like, I categorically deny that I ever got an order to start those water cannons.

Or that he was even aware that Good made that call, that phone call or called the order. Basically, the fire chief said the buck stopped with Sambor, and Sambor, the police chief, decided to let that fire burn.

That's right. Because he thought, not defending him, but he thought the fire would then take down the bunker and remove that advantage. Other people contend, and they ask him in the deposition or in the hearing, no, you've He really wanted to use the fire as a weapon.

He got real salty about that.

He did. He said, a fire can't be a weapon, basically. He said, Fire is fire. No one said, what about flamethrowers?

He goes, I hadn't thought about flamethrowers, but still.

All right, so this is 6:30. Flames are clearly out of hand. They waited way too long.

That was the thing that got me was it was obvious from what Sam Baur was saying, if the Henry is accurate, from what Sambor was saying, that when he was saying, No, we need to let the bunker burn still, by this time, the entire top floor was a confligration.

Yeah, it's on the news.

So that whole thing It didn't hold water at all. It would lend support to the idea that he was using it as a weapon to burn the people out.

I'm sure he was. I'm sure he thought, Tear gas didn't work. Maybe this fire will work and drive these people out of there. Okay. All right. Should we take Can we take a break or should we wait? No, let's take a break. Okay, we'll take a break and we'll tell you what happens next.

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On McCartney, A Life in Lyrx, you can hear the stories behind iconic tracks from Paul McCartony's career, like Hey Jude. The movement you need is on your shoulder.

The movement you need is on your shoulder. Now, I thought that was me just blocking in. And when I played it to John and Yoko in my music room on my psychedelic piano, I'm sitting facing this way, and they're standing behind me, almost on my shoulder. And they're listening, and I'm so pleased with myself, I'm playing this new song.

Listen to Paul McCartney dissect the people, experiences, and art behind his songwriting. Hear McCartney, a Life in Lyrx on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

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Okay, Chuck. So for a little bit, the fire department sprays some of the houses next to the move house, but doesn't put the fire out or spray the fire on the move house. So in the abandoned houses, they're spraying down to try to contain the fire. The one house in this whole square block area where they know people are, including seven children, they didn't spray. Later on, they will defend this by saying, Well, in that 1978 siege, move fired on the firefighters and apparently shot and injured several firefighters. We were worried for the firefighters to be picked off fighting this fire in this siege as well. Ramona Africa, who would be the one adult from move to survive this siege, would say, Well, like you said earlier, they weren't scared to hit us with these water cannons the whole time there wasn't a fire. But then there is a fire, and now they're scared we're going to pick them off. That doesn't make any sense. It's just BS.

Yeah. And also, I'm glad you brought that up because it said to put a pin in the steam. This is when the steam happened because they're blowing water on this fire out, and it's creating all the steam that they said didn't allow anyone to move in as well because they couldn't see anything. It was no visibility.

Okay. So despite spraying down the houses around this fire, it got out of hand really fast, and it spread very fast, and it moved very quickly, not just from the move house, but onto the neighboring houses and then beyond. And even these are fairly narrow streets that this neighborhood was built on, and it jumped the street fairly quickly.

Yeah, it wasn't contained or deemed under control until 11:41 PM.

So that's more than six hours after it started.

Yeah, this whole city block is just burning to the ground.

It ended up being like a six-alarm fire, which depending on the city, is 120 firefighters, chiefs, ladder trucks. It's a big old fire. Yeah.

You mentioned the 1978 siege where the officer was shot and killed and where the beating of Delbert, Africa, went down. Important I do remember that because two of the officers that were involved in the beat down of Delbert, Africa, were also on the scene today. They make a big point in this commission like, did you think about sending these guys in there? Might not be a good idea, and they may have revenge on their minds. I can't remember what the answer was. He's like...

He said, No, I didn't think of that. Or yes, I did. Whatever it was, he was not like, Yeah, that was not a good idea. He stood by whatever It was.

Right. So this sets up another story in tandem that's going on right now, which is at a certain point during this massive fire-About 7:00. Yeah, they tried to get out from the basement.

The move people tried to get out. They tried to escape.

That's right. They tried to get out the back door. At this point, the cops had moved into the alleyway. There was no camera access, so you couldn't see what happened. But from the testimony that can't even hardly get through the testimony of that kid. They deposed him. He wasn't in front of the commission. Birdy Africa? Yeah, but Birdy Africa was like, what? He looked like 10 or 11 years old when they deposed him.

Yeah, but he was actually 13.

Was he? But this kid is retelling this story. It seems incredibly credible and believable to me. I fully believe that he was telling the truth.

Over the two cops who may or may not, who may have actually fired on the people trying to escape the house. Of the two, it's way easier to believe that kid's testimony than these guys who are the ones who beat Delbert Africa in 1978.

Yeah, so that's what happened. They tried to leave. There was a kid named Rad Africa that was, I think, 13 or 14, and he was carrying out a baby, and he was one of the first ones out, and he goes back into the house. There's that part of the documentary where the priest is talking to the officers, and he's like... Because officers are saying, All we were saying was, Come out with your hands up.

Right, we didn't fire on anybody.

We didn't fire. They fired us. We said, Come out with your hands up. And this priest is like, I'm trying to think of what would make a kid holding a baby go back into a building engulfed in flames. And the cops are like, I don't know.

Yeah, you You can't really put yourself in a move person's feet. You can't really identify with them. And that minister or whatever said, Actually, I was friends with a lot of these people. I knew them on a human level. The other thing that really dams the two cops who beat Delbert Africa's testimony is that there was reports from a lot of witnesses, including fire department people, of gunfire in this alley around this time. So the whole thing adds up. If you take the reports of witnesses that there was gunfire in the back alley with Birdy Africa and Ramona Africa's testimony that around that same time people had tried to escape. And then the testimony of the cops themselves that the people had run back in the house. It sounds a lot like a reasonable person would conclude that the cops who had beaten Delbert, Africa, in 1978, shot at the people from Mouv in 1985 who tried to escape the fire and forced them back into the burning house. Right.

100%.

That's certainly what it sounds like.

The cops said that the kid, or he said he was a man, he was a kid, had a rifle that he pointed at them. I know what a rifle looks like because the kid who survived, Birdie said he had a monkey wrench in his hand that he used to get the window open. He came out with a monkey wrench and that baby. And the cop was like, I can tell the difference between a rifle and a monkey wrench. Yeah.

And if you're sitting here like, Hey, lay off the cops, just watch this documentary and then listen to this part over again. Because it's a really great documentary. It does a really good job of laying everything out. But part of the, I guess, the goodness of this documentary is that it's all archival and it lets the people speak for themselves.

Oh, yeah. It's just you basically watch what happened and listen what people said about it, including the people in charge.

It's edited. It's not just like, Here's this inquiry, here's my documentary. But it lets it pay out enough that you get a really good, clear picture of what happened in the testimony that followed.

That's the end of that story as it happened that Ramona and Birdy were the only two to make it out of that house alive.

That hero I mentioned earlier, Stop. Man, I wish I could remember his name.

I got his name.

He could not stop himself from running to Birdy to help him.

Yeah, officer James Berghire.

Berghire ran to them despite some of his colleagues saying, Don't, I think it's a trap. You're going to get killed. He said, I can't. I see this kid right there, and I'm going to go rescue him.

He thought of his kids, he said.

He did. And he was, they even And say in the inquiry, if there's any silver lining or shining moment to this whole horrible thing, it's what you did. And he got rousted out of the police Department within a year or two.

Oh, yeah. His own police Brewer turned on him. They wrote racial epithets on his locker because he saved this kid, was diagnosed with PTSD and left the forest two years later. And there's a great article I found that I read the first third of right before we had to record of him, an interview with him, I guess, five or six years ago that I can't wait to go read and finish up. So let's finish up.

Okay. So Birdy and Ramona were the only two move members who survived. The other 11 died, including six children. Yeah. In this house that was set on fire, and the fire was set off by a bomb that the Philadelphia Police Department dropped on the house. So obviously, Philadelphia is going to cough up some money for this.

Yeah, there were settlements. The parents of the dead children settled for $25 million total. Michael Ward, a young birdie, he became Michael Ward. He changed his name. He got $1.7 million. Ramona Africa got half a million dollars. And the families of John Africa and his nephew, they couldn't reach a settlement, so they were awarded $1 million by a jury. And then here's the kicker. Police Chief Sam Bor and Fire Chief Richmond were forced to pay a dollar a week for 11 years to Ramona Africa.

To keep it in mind.

Yeah, $572.

But that's a civil punishment, basically saying, we think you might not be criminally responsible, but in this civil suit, we are saying... It's basically like how- A symbolic payment or whatever. Yeah, it's like how the civil court ruled against O Right. Even though he had been found not guilty of murder. And the criminal. The civil court still said, No, you're responsible. We believe so. We're going to get you in this way. They did the same thing. And this was despite the fact that Ramona Africa did seven years. They didn't say, Hey, we're really sorry we burned this house. Right. She went to prison. Here's some money. They said, Hey, you're under arrest for inciting riots and conspiracy of something or other. And she did seven years. She didn't get out early because the parole board said, You have to denounce move. And she refused to denounce move, and she did her full seven years. Although now she is not affiliated with move any longer as far as I know.

Yeah. As far as the original Move 9, who are the ones in prison for the killing of the police officer, two of them died in prison. I think two are still in prison. The rest, including just in February, February 12th, Eddie Africa was paroled. Delbert and Chuck Africa are still behind bars. I think are the only two still behind bars. And as far as Michael Ward, a. K. A. Young Birdy Africa, He very sadly died in 2013 in a hot tub cruisehip drowning due to intoxication.

The Brevard County, Florida Medical Examiner ruled that an accidental death from drowning in the hot tub from just being drunk, I guess.

What a weird way to go after all that.

What a weird life.

Yeah. It's weird because during the deposition, he was there with his father, and I'm like, Where was his dad?

His dad was looking for him.

Well, his dad was out of the country in the military while he was living in Philadelphia.

Right. But he had moved to suburban Philadelphia. Yeah. His dad did and had been looking for Michael and had no idea he was 30 minutes away in Philly.

Yeah. So he lived the rest of his life with his dad, and that's who he referenced earlier when he was like, the stuff that went on there, I'll only tell my father. Super, super tragic. It's one of these things I think we should do a little triumvirate of this in Ruby Ridge in Waco, maybe. Yeah, agreed. Like three times where there was a potentially problematic organization, and the United States government just decided to firebomb it.

Yeah, these are so sticky because you want to be like, oh, these people are the victims. The government really was a villain in this one. But you're like, it's never that complex. And these stories really teach you that. It's always that complex. Things are much more textured than that. They're much more nuanced than that black and white. But even still, you don't drop a bomb and burn 11 people to death.

Yeah. The city, as far as that block went, they paid $11 million, which It was, by all accounts, a very inside deal with some developer who put up a bunch of houses that were condemned in 2000 due to shoddy construction. So somebody got rich, again, trying to build these things, did a terrible job. 24 families stayed. They offered repairs and buyouts, and apparently, most people took the buyouts. If you do the little Google Earth, the 6221 Osage, it's still row houses, and on either side of that, it looks like people might be living there. But that building has plywood up in the windows. Oh, really?

Because I heard starting in about 2015, they brought in a good developer and started to redevelop it, and it's starting to come back.

Well, it's interesting. That one address, though, is boarded up. So I don't know if no one wants to live there.

Or it could be an older Google image.

Yeah, those are usually newer, right?

I I wonder. Well, I mean, it could be older than 2015.

Although I looked at my house the other day and it was the old house. The old house? Yeah. I was like, oh. That's cute. It looked credier than I thought.

No, you got a good house. I got to see your new version. Yeah, you should. New fancy version. I'm Just waiting for an invite. Come on over. Oh, thanks. I can't. If you want to know more about the move bombing, please, we both beseech you. Go watch Let the Fire Burn on Amazon Prime, on the Internet, wherever you can see it, just see it. It's really good. Yeah.

We should point out, too, that no one involved on the cops and the political side suffered any punishments.

No, there was that inquiry, and no one was found guilty of any wrongdoing, except, although this will put a really good button on this multiracial panel, inquiry panel that held these hearings. To a person with one dissenter said that we conclude had this not been a black working class neighborhood, but instead a white working class neighborhood, the police never would have dropped that bomb.

Of course they wouldn't have. Yeah.

Okay, it's time for listening to me.

Who is the lone dissenter?

I didn't see. It's got to be the guy with the glasses.

It's always that guy. What am I going to call this? Perfect pitch, follow up. Hey, guys. Back in 2009, my band was recording an album, and there was one song that ends with us all singing and holding out a single note. The next song starts with us singing that same note.

That's cool.

See what they did? Adding drums, then the songs are edited together to have them flow into each other with no gap. Josh T is very interested because he's a musician. Jerry just be like, What? I'm eating miso. What did you guys say? We had finished recording that first one, and I can tell by the look on Josh's face, he's like, No, that old trick. We packed our instruments away. Then we were about to start the next one. We realized we needed to hear the first note so we could sing the right pitch. Instead of loading up the previous song, our pianist said, I have perfect pitch, and belted out the note, which we all, who don't have perfect pitch, trusted him to be right and started recording from there. Little did we know, he doesn't have perfect pitch, but it's close. When we edited the songs together and played them through, the notes were supposed to match, were off by about a half step.

Now it sounds like a Jerry edit.

Very dissonant, I'm really wrong. Oh, I just realized Gerri is going to hear this when she edits this episode. That's right. Just put a Wilhelm scream in there, Jerry. It'll all be all right. We were already out of the studio at that point, so we ended up just releasing it and claiming the dissonance was intentional. But we never let them off the hook with the old, Oh, yeah, you got perfect pitch, do you? Thanks so much for all the hard work, guys. I've learned so much. Been endlessly entertained for years. Signed, spanked, and sent. That is from Kenny.

Thank you, Kenny. We appreciate that. That was a pretty great email. It made me literally L-O-L.

I can only assume it's Kenny Rogers.

I also want to say this. We give Gerri a hard time around here. It's stuff you should know.

Oh, only when she's not here.

I cannot imagine. Actually, that's not true. We do it while she's sitting right there, too. I can't She's a good judge in stuff you should know without her. We love our Gerri, and she is perfect exactly the way she is.

I call that a nice save.

All right. Well, if you want to get in touch with us, you can go on to stuffyeshouldknow. Com and check out our social links, and you can also send us an email to stuffpodcast@iheartradio. Com.

Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio.

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On McCartney, A Life in L lyrics, you can hear the stories behind iconic tracks from Paul McCartony's career.

Like Hey, G. And when I played it to John and Yoko in my music room on my psychedelic piano, I'm sitting facing this way, and they're standing behind me.

Almost on my shoulder.

Hear McCartney, a Life in Lyrx on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

All that sitting and swiping, our backs hurt, our eyeballs sting. That's our bodies adapting to our technology. But we can do something about it.

We saw amazing effects. I really felt like the cloud in my brain dissipated. There's no turning back from me.

Make 2024 the year you put your health before your inbox and take the Body Electric challenge. Listen to Body Electric from NPR on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.