Randall Radic, AKA “Father Felony,” a former pastor at First Congregational Church in Ripon, CA, is awaiting sentencing after pleading guilty to felony grand theft by embezzlement. Radic may be facing up to 18 months in prison for selling his church without the congregation’s knowledge. He, in effect, stole his church. But he did it for a good cause–a BMW–which the mean prosecutors made him give up as part of the deal.
With just over two months until he will begin to serve a prison sentence, Radic spends some of his last few moments of freedom being interviewed by Dr. Blogstein.
Before we begin, a word of warning, Father Felony is not your average dumb criminal. He uses really big words so keep that dictionary handy. Also, this interview is rather lengthy, but stick with it, this is one fascinating man.
Dr. Blogstein: Thank you, Father Radic, for granting Dr. Blogstein your first and only interview since pleading guilty to felony grand theft charges. It is an honor to have a criminal of your stature in my corner of the world wide web.
Randall Radic: Thank you for having me. It is a privilege to be interviewed by the famous Dr. Blogstein.
Dr. B: You’ve been allowed to leave prison until your sentencing hearing on September 18th at which point you may be facing over a year in jail. What are you doing with your last few months of freedom?
RR: Quite a bit, actually. Domestically, I’m spending time with my fiance, who stood by me through all of this. She is without peer, plus she’s blindingly beautiful, charming and a great kisser. Ogive, baby! Ogive! We’re planning on getting married in July. It will be my third marriage, and hopefully, the ‘charmed’ one (Old Catholics are allowed to marry). And I’m spending as much time as possible with my five year old daughter. Her mother, my second wife, is one of life’s scintillates, a wonderful person who also supported me through my recent tribulations. I’m also smoking good cigars and drinking wine.
Professionally, I’m doing a lot of writing: working on a memoir of my experiences in jail, working on my sci-fi trilogy (volume one is done, volume two is almost done, and volume three is an outline in my head), and waiting for the release of my first memoir, The Sound of Meat, in August. It is being published as an e-book by Cool Publications of Great Britain. By the way, at the risk of appearing mercenary, I invite your myriad readers to buy it at www.coolpublications.com.
Finally, I’m looking for either an agent or a publisher. The goal is to obtain an advance so that I can complete my jail memoir. And redundant finally, I might be entering into a collaboration with another author to turn my jail experiences into a screenplay.
Dr. B: That’s a lot you have planned–you do realize your court date is September 18, 2006?
According to The Record of Stockton, CA, in exchange for these last few months of freedom, you will be helping the San Joaquin County District Attorney’s Office on another case. What are the details of that case and what will you be providing the DA?
RR: I ask your forgiveness and understanding on this particular question. I may only say that it is a high profile case. After that oblique answer, for the safety of my loved ones, all I can add is ‘no comment’.
Dr. B: I’m sorry. The answer I was looking for was “Yes, I killed Laci Peterson.”
Speaking of Laci, what is it about Modesto, CA and its vicinity that makes it a haven for weird and very public crimes?
RR: Maybe it’s something in the air or the water. The entire central valley of California sustains a very elevated index of crime. Many gangs reside in the central valley: Sorenos, Nortenos, Crips and Bloods, along with supreme white power gangs, such as the Norcal Woods and Nazi Lowriders. As a result, drugs, guns and out-and-out territorial warfare occur.
Additionally, from my perspective, there is an ambiance, a palpable energy, that pervades the central valley. Once in San Francisco, that energy dissipates and is replaced by another energy, one that is more psychologically salubrious.
Dr. B: Like I always say, “go where the energy is psychologically salubrious.”
As a pastor, you know that what you did surely goes against one of the more famous of the Ten Commandments, “Thou Shall Not Steal.” Are there any other commandments that you don’t agree with and plan on violating?
RR: Even though I am guilty of embezzlement, I do recommend NOT stealing, and I agree with the Ten Commandments. Yet I discover that I am fallible and weak. I am not, at the present juncture, planning on violating any of the others, although if you read The Sound of Meat you will discover that I have violated many others.
I plan on being a good boy from now on. I never want to return to jail. It is a horrifying place, whose inmates are animals, uneducated, mentally ill, or any combination of the aforementioned.
Mostly, I do not want to be separated from my loved ones again.
Dr. B: What bothers you more: The fact that you committed this crime or that you got caught?
RR: Without a doubt, the fact that I committed it. Looking back, I still cannot believe that I did what I did. Call it a type of temporary insanity, if you like. I am not offering that as an excuse or a reason, more of a hypothesis. Subconsciously, I knew that eventually I would be caught. But I consciously suppressed that knowledge. Fear is a strange and demanding master.
Dr. B: Was it an act of greed or desperation?
RR: Greed probably entered into it, but desperation played a preponderant role. Desperation for happiness, or rather the specious happiness that I believed money and material goods could provide. In that sense it was a drive for status, but a desperation for love was primary, because I wanted someone to love me, and believed that someone would be more prone to love me if I had money. In effect, then, I was trying to buy love. The desire, the need for love is a powerful motivation; indeed, it is so cogent that most of us don’t realize how overwhelming it is.
Dr. B: What worries you most about returning to prison?
RR: Violence.
99.9% of the inmates suffer from extreme anger problems, and anger is the result of unmet expectations. Their answer to these obstacles is violence. They envision no other recourse.
The inmates are of subnormal intelligence or sexually disoriented for the most part. Wrong think to the maximum is the natural adjunct. Add to that the innate status system that prevails in prison, and you have the matrix for barbarism, blood and thunder.
Prison supports a system of rigid stratification. These status levels are not formally recognized, nevertheless their reality impinges upon everyone and the inmates are continually gauging their personal status against that of everyone in sight: who’s the baddest of the bad kind of thing. The tensions are therefore dynamic, to say the least.
Murder and crimes of violence carry the most weight; then the so-called ordinary crimes, such as armed robbery, grand theft auto, etc. Sexual crimes reside at the anchor level: child molesters, called ‘chesters’ or ‘chilli-moes’, and rapists.
Dr. B: Sounds delightful. At least they give you funky cloths.
Do you consider the orange prison jumpsuit flattering on you?
RR: It depends on what kind of fashion statement one wants to make.
It’s a difficult color to co-ordinate. One is limited to either black or white as complements, yet even then the display is decidedly dumpy and washes out my complexion. Orange is a real fashion faux pas as far as I’m concerned.
Dr. B: I think orange is “thinning” on you.
Do you feel that you’ve been treated fairly in the press?
RR: Yes and no. Many of the facts the press reported were correct, but the context was skewed. It’s revolves more around what wasn’t said than what was said. Sterile reporting of the facts denies the humanity, the personality, of the perpetrator. Yet once one commits a crime, one loses all entitlements. Therefore it is useless to cavil about one’s ‘rights’ or about whether one is being treated fairly by the fourth estate.
Dr. B: Interesting perspective.
Also interesting is, how does one find a buyer for a church that you don’t own? I imagine you can’t just stick it up on eBay.
RR: It’s almost that easy. And now that I think about it, it probably could be done in that manner. I utilized a commercial real estate agent from a prominent firm. The building was listed online, and was shown as any other property for sale. Inspections were performed, documents signed, an account was opened at a local bank, and an electronic transfer of funds occurred. It was straight forward, business-like.
Dr. B: Do you have any plans to sell Dr. Blogstein?
RR: No, but it opens up a whole new realm of possibilities: the hacking and selling of website intangibles. Maybe even derivatives.
Dr. B: Calm down, I was kidding. I thought you were being a good boy from now on!
In your initial email to me on May 30th, you indicated that you are the founder of The Anti-Christian Christian Brotherhood and Social Club. What in God’s name is that?
RR: It was a bipartite reaction against the notable hypocrisy of many Christians.
First, toward those people who profess to Christianity, what-would-Jesus-do-kind-of-thinking, mercy and forgiveness, yet who in reality are merely modern day Pharisees, the people Jesus spoke of when He said, “Whitewashed tombstones full of dead men’s bones.”
Second, in contempt of the surfeit of inmates who, when they suddenly find themselves in jail, experience a cataclysmic religious conversion. Most of them are the child molesters, and of course, they are innocent. They even have Bible studies in jail during rec(reation) times. It’s all patently false, because when they are released they undergo a convenient Jesus-amnesia.
So I founded the Anti-Christian Christian Brotherhood and Social Club. It’s for “tax collectors and sinners,” those people who know who they are and what they have done and have no illusions about themselves. They’re losers and they know it, yet they believe in the concept of Grace as presented in Scripture.
Dr. B: That actually makes perfect sense.
Any plans for when you get out of prison?
RR: Yes. I plan to eventually move to San Francisco, write more books, both non-fiction and fiction; I’m even going to try screenplays.
Simultaneously I plan on living in luxury, a luxury provided by the royalties from bestselling memoirs (not by fraud, forgery, embezzlement, or any other illegal activity), smoking great cigars, drinking fine wines, having breakfast at the Buena Vista (with an attendant number of Irish Coffees), making love to my new wife, teaching my daughter to never turn out like her old man, learning French, traveling to Mallorca, and visiting my best friend, Bob Gay, who is presently in jail, waiting to go to prison.
Dr. B: Who is Bob Gay and what did he do?
RR: Bob Gay, whose full name is Robert Allen Gay, was recently convicted of voluntary manslaughter, which carries, when gun-enhanced, a 6 to 21 year prison sentence. He will be sentenced on July 24.
The D.A. charged him with the murder of his wife, and was seeking life-imprisonment for him. However, the forensic evidence pointed to a struggle taking place; additionally, Bob was shot in the side of his body.
Bob maintains that his wife confronted him with the gun, shot him, then he struggled with her, the gun went off, and she was killed.
He is a very intelligent man, has master’s degree in business from Ohio State University, and was some kind of regional vice-president/training guru for Orkin.
Now, that being said, in my unit, Intake 2, the protective custody unit, there were about 120 inmates. ALL of them were “innocent”! Yeah, right. I was the only one who admitted his guilt. Of course, I could afford to, as there was no way I wanted to go to trial — they had a paper trail on me as wide as Missouri.
For some reason, though, I believe Bob. In any event, he is my best friend. He kept me sane in jail; he was the only person capable of an intelligent, more-than-thirty-second-conversation.
Dr. B: And as long as you don’t marry him, you should be safe!
Finally, before I let you go, can you please explain the meaning behind the name of your blog and memoir? I mean, “Sound of Meat” is kind of a disturbing title.
RR: I got the idea for the title from Douglas Kahn’s great book: Noise, Water, Meat. By my definition, I’m a human being, albeit a flawed one. I’m composed of muscle, flesh, bone, etc. Therefore, in a sense, I’m meat. And I speak, that is, I make noise or sounds. So the story of my life is the sound of meat.
Dr. B: Sorry, pal. Still kind of creepy.
Well, Father Felony, I thank you for this opportunity. You’ve been most gracious.
RR: And I thank you for your patience, and the opportunity to speak. By the way, I like your blog. I understand why it’s so popular.
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