On May 21, 2017: Ringling Bros Circus performed its final show, shuttering after 146 years of
bringing joy to children and unrelenting torment to animals. The show celebrated all that had made
Ringling Bros so entertaining: acrobatics, human pyramids, stupid hats, animal abuse, whatever
this is, and of course, the secret, illegal spy agency the circus ran from 1988 to 1998.
Our story begins in 1981. The Reagan Administration hated socialism a lot,
so much so that the CIA decided to sell weapons to the Iranians and use the money to fund a group
of Nicaraguan anti-socialist rebels called the Contras. The CIA was so proud of the plan that
they decided to lie to Congress a bunch about it, leading to several people going to jail,
including this guy, Clair George, who before being a person who was in jail had been the
Chief of Covert Ops and third-highest ranking member of the CIA. For no good reason at all,
George was pardoned, and then was faced with a question: “What’s a disgraced newly pardoned
ex-CIA official with a stack of legal bills taller than than an abused African elephant supposed to
do?” Well, why not join the circus? And so he did, with circus head honcho Ken Feld initially hiring
George to use his diplomatic connections to help him acquire a panda that he could show to people
in his big weird tents, though their partnership soon grew until Clair George was running what can
only be described as a secret circus spy agency. The agency didn’t have an official name,
but court filings have referred to it as the John Doe Company, and while we only know so much about
what the agency did—because as anyone who runs a secret circus spy agency knows, the secret part is
really important—what we do know is absolutely bonkers. For starters, over a ten-year period,
the John Doe Company managed to insert at least 16 secret agents into various activism
organizations who were of the outrageous opinion that animal abuse is bad: PETA, PAWS, and the
Elephant Alliance were all infiltrated by agents who rose through the ranks and stole thousands
of documents, including bank information, credit card numbers, personal medical records, and even
a list of all PETA contacts, all of which were used to sabotage fundraising and demonstrations,
and reduce membership. At one point agents broke into the Executive Director of PETA’s
home and office to take surveillance photos, one agent became so trusted that they accompanied the
Executive Director of PAWS to testify in front of Congress, and, perhaps my favorite, another
agent attempted to convince the deputy director of PETA to steal Ringling Bros animals as a protest,
with the intent of arresting them afterwards, which he sadly didn’t actually do because
it would be a perfect premise for Ocean’s 14. The John Doe Company also bugged and wiretapped
their own circus employees, often to bully them into abandoning worker’s comp claims,
but I don’t have time to talk about that because I have to tell you about the most incredible, insane
project the agency ever pulled: Project Preempt. First, some backstory: In addition to being Ken
Feld’s dad, Irvin Feld was a gay man, which is cool, but Irvin didn’t seem to feel that it
was all that cool and remained closeted his whole life, leading to his wife Adele eventually killing
herself, reportedly because she was so distraught over her husband not seeming attracted to her,
which I guess to be fair, he wasn’t, because as I mentioned, he was gay. It’s a sad story,
and also a pretty interesting one, which is why a woman named Janice Pottker wrote an article
about both that and the Feld family’s non-gay but nefarious business dealings for a local business
magazine in 1990. Pottker soon grew interested in writing a whole book about the Felds, and so,
both to prevent the damaging book from coming out and to apparently get revenge on Pottker for
saying his dad was gay, Ken Feld had Clair George run an eight-year operation to sabotage not only
the book, but Pottker’s whole career. A man named Robert Eringer was dispatched to pose as a fellow
writer, befriend Pottker, and gain her trust, which he did easily because writers are lonely and
desperate for connection. At first things started simple: Eringer would find out where Pottker was
pitching her book or articles about the circus, and then the circus would dispatch agents to
convince the publications that Pottker was a lunatic who couldn’t be trusted, which wasn’t that
hard seeing as it was the 90s and calling women crazy was super-duper trendy. But Pottker wouldn’t
give up on her circus book, so Eringer was then ordered to convince Pottker to consider writing
a different book, not about the Feld family, but about the Mars candy family. Then, Eringer got her
a—and I’m putting this in massive air quotes—“book deal” with the little-known National Press Books.
The reason for the air quotes is that the advance for this book deal was actually, secretly being
paid by the circus, solely to distract Pottker from writing the circus book. The trouble was,
the book Pottker wrote on the Mars family was quite good, and starting to get some buzz. So,
solely out of spite, the circus instructed the publisher not to pay the $300 they owed the book’s
photographer, which led to the book committing copyright infringement and quickly being pulled
from all shelves. There was also a second fake book deal, this time co-written by Eringer,
that Eringer sabotaged by intentionally writing his chapters really poorly, and also, just by the
way, a failed attempt to hire a bodybuilder to goad Pottker into an affair that would ruin her
marriage. Eventually Pottker found out everything and sued, and I’m running out of time here, but I
simply have to tell you how the beans got spilled. Okay, so, there was a guy named Charles Smith,
a top executive at the circus, and he thought his girlfriend, who also worked for the circus,
was cheating on him, so he bugged her house and office, and then one day he told an assistant to
destroy the tapes of her, and also, unrelatedly, to return her car to her house. But the assistant
misunderstood and returned the tapes of the girlfriend to the girlfriend, who called the cops
and then Smith got fired and then sued the circus and revealed all of this, which is how Pottker and
PETA found out, and then how I found out and now how you found out. And that, my friends,
is why they call it the Greatest Show on Earth. Meanwhile… I have pretty specific thoughts on
what’s the best dinner on earth. I don’t think it’s delivery because it’s expensive, and slow,
and unhealthy, and usually by the time it gets to you kinda soggy and gross. I also don’t think its
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than you usually actually need, then find a good recipe, then make probably more than you’ll eat,
and suddenly it’s 9:00 pm and you have no time left to do nothing on the couch. What I think is
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