The Cut - Snap Classic

When the man in charge of a small, insular northern Ohio town wreaks havoc on his followers, a young Amish boy with a passion for good hair tries to clean up the mess. Produced by Shaina Shealy, original score by Renzo Gorrio. Season 17 - Episode 10 Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices https://dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:08Glynn Washington?

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• 2:38Glynn Washington?

  Okay, so when I was younger, I used to cut my brother's hair because I could work a tight fade, but you had to have patience. Looking good takes time. And one day, my brother decided he didn't have any patience, none. Come on, he had somewhere he was supposed to be. Camille said she was gonna stop by Larry's place. Man, Camille ain't stepping foot in that dump. She might catch a tetanus. Hurry up! Shut up. If I jack up your hand, you're gonna be mad, so just relax. Hurry up! You're lucky I don't cut your ears off for you. Slowly and methodically, I try to make it even on both sides. Give me them clippers! I said, shut up.

• 3:23Glynn Washington?

  He snatches the clippers out of my hand, runs it through the middle of his scalp. The clipper guard snaps off. He shaves a furrow right through the middle of his hair. My laughter is pure, clean, free. I can't breathe. It's a disaster, a hair cutting horror show, and it's not even my fault. I warned him twice. And things unfold as they might in a storybook. But my brother cries real tears as the rest of us laugh. It is magic, snappers. Amazing.

• 4:01Glynn Washington?

  And so today, on Snap Judgment, we proudly present The Cut. Incredible stories from the razor's edge. My name is Glynn Washington. Please know, for a small fee, I would gladly cut your hair as well. Because you're listening to Snap Judgment.

• 4:34Glynn Washington?

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• 6:39Glynn Washington?

  Welcome back to Snap Judgment, the cut episode. Incredible stories from the razor's edge. We started with a bad hair day. But up next is a haircut story that actually ends with a 911 call.

• 6:52Speaker 01

  911, what is your emergency?

• 6:55Speaker 02

  See, I'd like to ask the home son to sure about it.

• 6:58Speaker 01

  What's wrong out there?

• 6:59Speaker 02

  Huh?

• 7:00Speaker 01

  What's the problem there?

• 7:01Speaker 02

  Some guy attacked his grandpa and gave him a bad haircut.

• 7:06Speaker 01

  What happened?

• 7:08Glynn Washington?

  But to figure out how we got here, you have to start with a young man named Johnny Mast in a small, insular farming town in northern Ohio. Johnny had a thing for good hair.

• 7:25Speaker 03

  My hair had to be like almost perfect. I'd have a comb and I'd comb it and comb it. If I found a couple of hair too long, I'd have to scissor there and snip a little here and snip a little there. It didn't always turn out the way it was supposed to, but I did what I could.

• 7:44Speaker 04

  Did what he could because Johnny was only ever allowed to have one hairstyle, a bowl cut.

• 7:51Speaker 03

  Basically, you let your hair grow out and then you just like cut a straight line around your head and that's about it.

• 7:57Speaker 04

  Johnny's hair is rusty orange and thick. In a bowl cut, it poofed out above his ears. It almost looked like a fur hat.

• 8:06Speaker 03

  I wanted something more and I always, I always wanted a haircut with a clipper, buzz style haircuts, you know, shingled.

• 8:13Speaker 04

  But the bowl style was his only option. All the guys in town had the same cut. They wore the same hand-sewn jeans, the same suspenders, the same blue cotton button-down shirts.

• 8:26Speaker 03

  The men in the community, once they get married... They then grow a full beard minus a mustache. I guess you'd call it like a chin strap beard. Even if, let's say, one side grows longer than the other, they're not allowed to trim it to make it even.

• 8:41Speaker 04

  The hair, beard, suspenders are part of a dress code in Burkhal's. Burkhal's is a tiny little community. It's Amish, but not really Amish. Twenty-five years ago, a man named Sam Mullitt broke off from his nearby Amish church and drove his horse and buggy north, deep into the hilly Ohio woods. He bought 800 acres of land there and put himself in charge.

• 9:09Speaker 03

  He's like some, how would you say it, like a small town somewhere that has had their sheriff for 50 years and basically whatever the sheriff says is gonna fly, he's just, he's just kinda like the whole justice all in one package. Whatever he says, it doesn't really go to a grandeur or anything like that. It's just, Sam said it, so let's go. The man's six foot four and probably weighs 280 pounds, you know, he's just, he's a big, built dude. And if he gets frustrated about something, he wants to try to get his point across. He'll just stand there and with his straight ahead, confident way of talking and kinda stares you down and tells you what the what is. I mean, you're just, okay, yes, sir.

• 9:53Speaker 04

  But Sam is also Johnny's grandpa. And back when he was young, he was so obsessed with pleasing Sam that he didn't even see this thing he's talking about. That Sam was really the dictator of a tiny village.

• 10:10Speaker 03

  I just always felt like I wanted to be, grow up to be like Sam, you know? I wanted to please him in some way, shape, or form.

• 10:19Speaker 04

  It was an approval trap. And it would become really, really dangerous for the whole town, especially Johnny. And the thing is, Johnny did have his grandpa's approval. He was a really good kid. His big acting out was sneaking out to the town payphone, where he and his friends called a number that played music and then huddled around the receiver to listen.

• 10:50Speaker 04

  His daily life was all about helping out. Farming corn, or wheat, or oats with his uncles. Johnny's favorite task was tending to the horses.

• 11:00Speaker 03

  Letting them eat their grain and their hay in the morning, getting the horses all harnessed up, and hook them up to a plow.

• 11:06Speaker 04

  When Johnny was a kid, he had his own pony. He remembers staying out in the barn all day, trimming the hairs around its feet.

• 11:15Speaker 03

  There was one hair too long, and I happened to see it a day later. I'd be there, working on getting that hair down, and then maybe, next thing I know, I'd spent two hours giving my horse a haircut. It was just, I was just real picky about stuff like that. It had to be perfect, or it wasn't good enough.

• 11:31Speaker 04

  School only goes up to the 8th grade in Burgles. And Johnny started working odd jobs after that. He groomed horses in his free time. His life was simple and predictable. But one winter evening, when Johnny was 17, his mom called him in from the barn. She had come back from this women's meeting at Sam's house.

• 11:55Speaker 03

  Normally, they'd just get together to help Grandma work on whatever, and then the one day she came home and had the news that we all had to write our sins on a paper, so...

• 12:05Speaker 04

  At the meeting, Sam started off by announcing that there were bad things going on in Burgles. Disagreement, divorces, death. Then he explained that those bad things were happening because the people of Burgles were sinners. And then Sam explained that he, as a bishop, could forgive people. But, only if everyone wrote down all their sins. So he called for this sort of mass confessional.

• 12:39Speaker 03

  I was...

• 12:42Speaker 03

  Very, very freaked out about it at first. Like, I was like, you know, this is super weird. Kind of had a deadline. We had about a week.

• 12:50Speaker 04

  Johnny's mom brought out notepads for everyone. And Johnny went to his bedroom. He spent hours scribbling every sin he could think of. From the tiniest incident of cheating in math class to the more serious stuff.

• 13:04Speaker 03

  Things that I'm not comfortable to discuss, but...

• 13:07Speaker 04

  So Johnny's family submitted their list of sins and then waited. They heard nothing about the list for weeks. And then, suddenly, it was Christmas. Johnny looked forward to Christmas Day all year. A big dinner with all his cousins at Sam's house. Fresh ham, mashed potatoes, homemade bread, turkey hunting with all the guys in the afternoon.

• 13:34Speaker 03

  So we went out to the barn, you know, brushed the horse, put a harness on him, hooked him up to the buggy, got some thick blankets in the buggy trying to stay warm.

• 13:42Speaker 04

  Johnny and his family rode their buggy through slick, hilly, snowy terrain for hours.

• 13:48Speaker 03

  Yeah, we walked in and smelled the ham and the mashed potatoes and everything just smelled great.

• 13:54Speaker 04

  They were just sitting down to dinner. And that's when Sam decided to bring up those lists of sins. He wasn't happy.

• 14:02Speaker 03

  None of you were truthful with what you wrote down on your letters. My mom just stood there and she basically just looked like somebody punched her in the face. And my dad just stood there and looked at Sam a little bit and he's like, "I don't know what more you want me to write."

• 14:21Speaker 04

  Sam wouldn't let it go. He ordered the family to leave the house right then and there. There would be no Christmas festivities this year. Stunned, Johnny and the rest of his family started putting back on their gloves and coats. They turned for the door.

• 14:40Speaker 03

  John can stay, but the rest of them are all gonna have to go because none of them told the truth.

• 14:45Speaker 04

  This was the moment that Sam chose Johnny.

• 14:49Speaker 03

  And I was like...

• 14:52Speaker 03

  Really, you know, kind of flustered, didn't know what to do. I didn't know, should I stay? Should I leave? I had to basically kick my family out, you know, not, not stand up and, you know, agree with them.

• 15:08Speaker 04

  Johnny decided to stay. Not just for Christmas night. Johnny moved in with Sam for good. He slept in his own room upstairs. And it's not just that he moved in with Sam. He allied himself with Sam. He started to enforce Sam's rules. Like, if he heard someone was late to cut Sam's hay or saw someone smoking a cigarette, he'd report back to Sam. Or if Sam said one of the guys in town was sinning, then Johnny got his buddies to bully that guy into admitting his sins, real or not.

• 15:43Speaker 03

  I was doing good and I would finally start to feel that moment of kind of having Sam's good graces, you know, kind of getting on his good side. He had me to the point where I was scared of the fact that if I wouldn't listen, do what he says, I would basically be signing a long way ticket to hell.

• 16:02Speaker 04

  There were a lot of people in Bergkohl's who were scared of Sam. He would single people out, like this one guy, a vegetable farmer named Levi Miller. When Levi Miller wrote up his list of sins for Sam's approval, Sam said he was lying and decided to make an example out of him.

• 16:22Speaker 03

  Sam basically told him, you know, hey, you know, this is, you're gonna have to sit in the chicken coop for X amount of days or whatever until you write everything down.

• 16:31Speaker 04

  Sam sent Levi to live in a chicken coop. So Levi just walked himself into a chicken coop?

• 16:38Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 16:38Speaker 04

  Are there chickens in the coop?

• 16:39Speaker 03

  There's probably 45 or 50 chickens in there.

• 16:42Speaker 04

  Like, live chickens?

• 16:43Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 16:44Speaker 04

  Oh, my god. Sam told Levi he had to stay in the chicken coop until he came clean with his sins, the real sins. To be clear, this demand was entirely impossible to meet.

• 17:00Speaker 04

  Two or three weeks went by.

• 17:02Speaker 03

  And it got to the point where he was so hungry that whenever the little kids or somebody would bring out scraps for the chicken, like table scraps being lettuce, the bad part of a tomato.

• 17:15Speaker 04

  For the chickens.

• 17:16Speaker 03

  For the chickens.

• 17:16Speaker 04

  They were feeding the chickens.

• 17:17Speaker 03

  Yep, and it got to the point where he was hungry enough to where he was picking through that leftover stuff. Imagine what that looked like. It's got a terrible smell to it. So, basically made him live like an animal.

• 17:29Speaker 04

  And is he locked? Is there like a chain around the chicken coop?

• 17:32Speaker 03

  There's literally a bungee cord holding that door shut. All he has to do is push that door and he can walk out. Why doesn't he walk out?

• 17:41Speaker 04

  And what did it feel like for you to sort of like passively watch all this going down?

• 17:48Speaker 03

  I didn't like it. I didn't think it was right. But at that time, I didn't really...

• 17:59Speaker 03

  My feelings were kind of dead in a way.

• 18:02Speaker 04

  Inside the coop, Levi kept writing down his sins over and over again. But his list never satisfied Sam. And then, one evening after putting up the horses, Johnny and some of his cousins headed to Sam's house. They sat around a table, talking about Levi.

• 18:24Speaker 03

  And finally Sam was like, "Cut this guy's hair and his beard off. I bet that'll make him talk." He's like, "Bring it down to my house and I'll hang it up on the wall like a turkey beard."

• 18:35Speaker 04

  Cutting off an Amish man's beard is like ripping off a woman's clothes and making her walk around naked for months. But Sam had built up a sort of gang of loyal young men who wanted more than anything to please him. Johnny watched them walk out the door.

• 18:54Speaker 03

  About 8:30 Saturday night, Levi's son-in-law walks into Sam's house and he had a garbage bag and said, "Well, here's your hair and your beard that you wanted."

• 19:04Speaker 03

  I didn't really know what to think as far as, you know, was this pushing it over the line, you know, was this... I didn't really have an opinion on that, if that makes sense. And Sam even said, you know, that this is crazy, but he just, he just felt like it would give Levi a new beginning.

• 19:28Speaker 04

  Sam didn't hang the hair on his wall. Instead, he asked Johnny to check in on Levi in the chicken coop, to make sure he wasn't lonely.

• 19:40Speaker 03

  Sam had this thing where he'd slam somebody so bad and then he'd pull them back and try to make them feel good. So he said, "You know, you guys go visit him, you know, he'd probably like that." So we went up there to see him, and he was glad to see us. But when I walked in and seen him, I would have hardly known that man.

• 19:59Speaker 04

  Levi hadn't trimmed his sideburns in over 20 years. His beard had been more than 10 inches from his chin.

• 20:09Speaker 03

  His hair was completely gone. I mean, it was just... And it wasn't a nice, smooth haircut. It was just, like, chopped off. There was some long strands hanging down beside his ears still, and it was just a mess. His beard was cut off straight. He actually, he looked scary.

• 20:27Speaker 04

  Johnny says the haircut was so ugly, it looked like it hurt.

• 20:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, after I seen him with his bad haircut, I said, "We gotta, we gotta do something. He looks terrible." And then Sam was like, "Well, yeah, you can, you know, you can give him a haircut if you want, you know, make him look better." The guy hadn't had a shower in like, a month.

• 20:50Speaker 04

  So Johnny got Levi from the chicken coop, walked him into Sam's house, and propped him up on a wooden stool in the kitchen. He smelled like rotting garbage. Johnny ran his fingers through thick patches of scruff on Levi's head and dirty, long strands of hair hanging from the sides of his face, and snipped away.

• 21:11Speaker 03

  It looked decent, but it just wasn't quite, it just wasn't quite to my satisfaction. So I kept, you know, thinking, like, you know, a clipper would be real nice, it'd be real easy.

• 21:24Speaker 04

  What Johnny really needed to fix Levi's face, what he had always wanted, electric clippers, which weren't a thing in Virgols. Johnny asked Sam if he could get them. Sam just stared back at him and frowned. He didn't exactly say no.

• 21:44Speaker 04

  On the way home from work a few weeks later, Johnny put all his savings in the pockets of his hand-sewn jeans and walked into Walmart with his bowl cut and suspenders to buy a pair of clippers.

• 22:04Glynn Washington?

  Stay with us, snappers. When our story continues, find out what happens when a rural farm boy attempts to use an electric shaver. The stunning conclusion in just a moment. Stay tuned.

• 22:35Glynn Washington?

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• 24:04Glynn Washington?

  I almost didn't care when the plane got delayed again.

• 24:10Glynn Washington?

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• 24:34Glynn Washington?

  Welcome back to Snap Judgment, the cut episode. When last we left Johnny, he was trying to fix a haircut that looked so bad. It looked so bad it hurt. Snap Judgment.

• 24:53Speaker 04

  On the way home from work a few weeks later, Johnny put all his savings in the pockets of his hand-sewn jeans and walked into Walmart with his bowl cut and suspenders to buy a pair of clippers.

• 25:09Speaker 03

  Just the fact of being Amish with a bowl-style haircut and standing there in Walmart looking at these clippers that are actually made for, you know, to give buzz cuts, I felt like I should be looking over my shoulder, make sure nobody's looking, you know, to see what I'm doing.

• 25:25Speaker 04

  There, in the men's beauty aisle, Johnny saw a world of possibilities.

• 25:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think I paid 40 bucks for it or something.

• 25:34Speaker 04

  Did it feel powerful at all?

• 25:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, I think it kind of gave me a, you know, after going and buying it, taking it home, and not really getting any repercussions for it, I think it kind of, kind of gave me a little bit of a, like a daring, like a daring attitude of, you know, kind of crowding the line a little bit, maybe, I guess what some people would say, coloring outside the line a little bit. It just, like, it kind of, kind of took the edge off of, from doing something of, you know, stepping over the line just a little bit.

• 26:13Speaker 04

  But I'm still sort of wondering what compelled you to take that risk?

• 26:17Speaker 03

  I just, I just couldn't, or I just totally couldn't take it anymore. I was like, wow, you know, this guy, he just looks terrible. I don't know, I think that just...

• 26:26Speaker 03

  I don't know. It just pushed me to the point where I was like, I have to do something. I have to make this look better. I have to fix it.

• 26:33Speaker 04

  That night, Johnny powered up the hair clipper with a homemade battery charger. He brought Levi into Sam's kitchen again.

• 26:42Speaker 03

  I was, I was really nervous cutting his hair the first time.

• 26:47Speaker 04

  The only haircut he'd ever seen was a bowl cut.

• 26:50Speaker 03

  I looked at the paper that came with the clippers and I was looking over the paper. I was like, okay, this is supposed to, you know, do it this way and then like this.

• 26:59Speaker 04

  When it was done, Levi's beard was even. Johnny handed Levi a plastic mirror.

• 27:06Speaker 03

  And then he smiled a little bit and then he went back to work and I went back to doing my work.

• 27:12Speaker 04

  Deer hunting season opened the next week and Sam invited about 10 guys over to his farm to stay for a while and work the land. One of those guys was Johnny's dad. Johnny and his dad hadn't really been talking for the past year since Johnny moved in with Sam, but they were cordial with each other. Everyone was just excited to be together and go hunting, drama free.

• 27:40Speaker 03

  Everybody, you know, walked along the table cafeteria style and got their hot meal and sat down and ate. You could tell they all felt good. They felt relaxed. They were sitting back, you know, just starting to relax and...

• 27:50Speaker 04

  When Sam's daughter came into the room to clear the plates, she was holding scissors. She looked out over the table of men and said, "All of you are sinners."

• 28:03Speaker 03

  And she just went along the line and everybody's hair and beard just kind of sort of got chopped off right then and there. And you should have seen the look on those poor guy's face. They looked like a, they looked like a beaten puppy is what they looked like. I mean, they just, just looked like somebody just really, you know, just punched the crap out of them is what they looked like. Some of these guys had long, thick beards, big bushy hair. I mean, there was hair everywhere, on the sofa, on these guys' clothes, on the floor. I've never in my lifetime seen that many hair.

• 28:46Speaker 04

  And then Sam's daughter, Johnny's aunt, walked over to him.

• 28:53Speaker 03

  Then Sam was like, "Well Johnny, you might as well go cut some of your dad's hair too." And that's when my heart kinda hit my toes.

• 29:02Speaker 04

  Sam asked Johnny to cut his own father's hair. The worst imaginable thing a son could do to his father. This was Johnny's big test.

• 29:13Speaker 03

  I was still like in a daze, standing up, walking across the room. And every footstep across the room sounded like thunder. And finally got over to where my dad was sitting and I just stood there and looked. My dad kinda looked up at me and I just kinda looked the other way and took the scissors and took a hold of a strand of hair and just remembered the sound of the scissors going through that hair like it was yesterday. And I took one snip of hair off of his head and it was a terrible feeling. Terrible.

• 29:52Speaker 04

  Johnny's dad and the other guests went to sleep in the barn that night. They slept in the cold, on piles of hay.

• 30:00Speaker 04

  The next morning, Johnny went to see his dad in the barn.

• 30:03Speaker 03

  His hat was too big, sitting down almost in his eyes. His ears were pushed out the side of his hat, looking all cold. And his beard was just chopped off straight across the bottom. His face looked white. He looked like a scary, scary beast.

• 30:24Speaker 04

  So Johnny did his thing. He brought his dad into Sam's kitchen.

• 30:30Speaker 03

  I asked him, you know, kinda like, "Well, what kinda haircut you want? You want it real short or you want your beard like completely gone? Or you wanna leave it, you know, like a little bit of..."

• 30:40Speaker 04

  Ever since Johnny moved out, he and his dad spoke like strangers on the street. And now, they were face to face.

• 30:48Speaker 03

  And he didn't say much. So I got the clipper and I started clipping, you know. Took the longest guy that could, you know, tried to leave as much hair as I could. Ended up having to do almost a buzz cut. I would say I probably took a little bit more time and was a little bit more particular about, you know, every little detail on his haircut. More so than normal, just because, you know, it felt to me like I was fixing something that I ruined.

• 31:15Speaker 04

  But Sam kept ordering more and more haircuts. He ordered his minions to cut off women's hair and other beards of men who had sinned. And every time Johnny would find these guys, dazed with botched patches of hair on their faces and heads. And every time, he sat them down in Sam's kitchen and went to work.

• 31:40Speaker 03

  I probably did four, five a week on average for a couple of weeks.

• 31:47Speaker 04

  So Johnny was Sam's henchman, but now he was also a bit of a cleanup man. Fixing and trimming, smoothing and caring for all the hair and beards that Sam had hacked up.

• 32:02Speaker 03

  After a while, I got pretty good at it. Another one of the guys would have been my second cousin, and he had dark hair, dark red hair. And he always had kind of a bald head, a real long bushy beard. So I just kind of left him a nice little goatee. He kind of looked around and he was like, "You're just gonna leave that there?" Like, "Yeah, I'm just gonna leave that there for right now. I think it looks good. You kind of look like a guy that'd be riding around on a Harley-Davidson." And everybody kind of had to laugh then.

• 32:30Speaker 04

  And do you think that cutting hair, that cleaning up people's haircuts, was the way that you coped with the situation?

• 32:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, I would say every time I got done with helping somebody clean up their haircut, you know, making it look better, afterwards, I always felt like I kind of had a personal connection with him and could walk up to him and talk to him about anything. It was just, it felt like I was able to like, reach out to somebody that was hurting and help him and pull him up, you know, and make him feel better.

• 33:02Speaker 04

  This went on for about a year. Inside the confines of the Burghols community, everyone knew the wrath of Sam. But then, in the fall of 2011, Sam took the hostile haircut thing outside the borders of Burghols. Johnny says Sam wanted revenge, meaning he wanted to punish other Amish communities who were accepting defectors from Sam's group. On October 4th, Johnny piled into an empty livestock trailer hooked up to a truck with 18 boys from Burghols. They headed west.

• 33:41Speaker 03

  It's pretty crazy what happened that night.

• 33:45Speaker 04

  The truck pulled up to an unfamiliar house. A group of boys got out of the trailer. Johnny stayed back. Because he was Sam's right-hand man, the boys decided he shouldn't get his hands dirty.

• 33:58Speaker 03

  And it sat there a couple minutes, and we heard a knock on the door. Everything was quiet for a couple minutes. And all of a sudden, there was a screaming. We heard women just, I mean, screaming at the top of their lungs.

• 34:18Speaker 04

  Johnny says the boys barged into a house, pinned down an Amish man, and forcibly cut his hair. The victim fought back, causing a scene, and wrote down the license plate number of the truck.

• 34:31Speaker 01

  911, what is your emergency?

• 34:36Speaker 02

  See, I'd like to ask the homicide attorney about it.

• 34:39Speaker 01

  What's wrong out there?

• 34:41Speaker 02

  Huh?

• 34:42Speaker 01

  What's the problem there?

• 34:43Speaker 02

  Some guy attacked his grandpa and gave him a bad haircut.

• 34:47Speaker 01

  What happened?

• 34:49Speaker 02

  Guy from Virginia, Ohio stopped in and got his grandpa out of bed and cut off his beard and gave him a haircut.

• 34:58Speaker 01

  Did you know these people?

• 35:00Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 35:01Speaker 01

  Are they still there?

• 35:03Speaker 02

  No, they left.

• 35:04Speaker 01

  How long they been gone?

• 35:06Speaker 02

  About 15 minutes ago.

• 35:08Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 35:09Speaker 02

  But we would like to show them the police, the evidence, so they can return, go there and take them into prison.

• 35:18Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 35:19Speaker 02

  They're doing this, it is now, just three different guys.

• 35:23Speaker 01

  Three men came there?

• 35:25Speaker 02

  No, there were five of them.

• 35:26Speaker 01

  Five?

• 35:28Speaker 02

  What'd they say? Well, I wasn't there at the time. I was just... Oh. They woke me up and shit their words. What's your name? Levi.

• 35:36Speaker 04

  The next day, a county sheriff showed up at Sam's house and arrested four of the boys.

• 35:43Speaker 04

  The Holmes County Sheriff eventually turned the case over to the federal government. Suddenly, there was a federal investigation into Sam's revenge haircuts. The feds were desperately looking for one piece of evidence, and Johnny was the only one who knew where it was.

• 36:08Speaker 04

  So, we're hiking up now into the woods. This is where you buried the camera.

• 36:15Speaker 03

  This is the woods where I buried the camera in.

• 36:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, this woods is long and steep.

• 36:25Speaker 03

  I hear a lot of acorns coming down with the wind right now.

• 36:30Speaker 03

  Try not to get bopped on the head with one of those.

• 36:33Speaker 04

  When the boys went out in the van that night, they had taken pictures. Pictures of men forced against a wall, getting their beards chopped.

• 36:44Speaker 03

  The guy that had the camera wanted me to destroy the camera. Said, "Get rid of it. You know, it's evidence. They don't want it to be found, blah, blah, blah." And I was like, "I'll put it somewhere where nobody's ever gonna find it."

• 36:57Speaker 03

  Uh, from where we're standing,

• 37:00Speaker 03

  almost straight up the hill, you can see the trail going up the hill. And I buried it there without anybody knowing it. I put it into two Ziploc baggies and got down on my hands and knees and dug a little hole beside the tree and buried it, covered it up, and carved an X on the tree with my knife.

• 37:16Speaker 04

  Months into the investigation, Johnny and most of the other boys were subpoenaed. The prosecutor was looking for that camera.

• 37:24Speaker 03

  I mean, I was confused and...

• 37:28Speaker 03

  Very, very angry.

• 37:32Speaker 04

  Johnny had a choice. Turn in the camera, or go to prison.

• 37:39Speaker 03

  And I knew he would get convicted no matter whether I cooperated with the government attorneys or not. I was like, it's damned if I do and damned if I don't. He's going to prison no matter what.

• 37:51Speaker 04

  Johnny decided to save himself. He went back to the woods, dug up the camera, and turned it over.

• 38:00Speaker 05

  Lee, the Justice Department making it clear that in the Amish community, a man's hair and beard are sacred, and any effort to forcibly shave or cut that hair in their eyes is elevated to the level of a hate crime.

• 38:11Speaker 04

  Fifteen men and women from the Burkes community were convicted and sentenced to up to seven years in prison. But the most severe sentence was doled out to Sam Mullet. Sam was sentenced to fifteen years and carted off to a federal prison in Texarkana, Texas.

• 38:32Speaker 04

  On a humid fall afternoon, two shirtless guys are on the roof of Johnny's new house. It's about two hours from Burkes. The guys are yelling to each other in Pennsylvania Dutch, or as Johnny calls it, Amish. Remind me of their names?

• 38:47Speaker 03

  Aiden, and then my brother Vern. He's up on the scaffold.

• 38:50Speaker 04

  Almost all of Johnny's brothers have left Burkes. Cousin Aiden left just two months ago. And now, they're rebuilding their lives. Johnny lives here with his girlfriend Clara. She also left her Amish community. The three of us climb into Johnny's truck. We make the two-hour drive to Burkes.

• 39:13Speaker 03

  We're out. We're, it's very rolling and there's a...

• 39:17Speaker 04

  We pull off the highway and drive through a small town, across a shallow river and up winding hills.

• 39:23Speaker 03

  Even just driving around, just driving on the roads, you know, there's a lot of good memories of...

• 39:31Speaker 03

  Basically driving up and down the road with our horses, you know, racing our horses on the road and a lot of stuff like that, you know, we used to have an absolute blast.

• 39:41Speaker 04

  The road gets narrower as we pull into town. The pavement is etched with tracks of thin buggy wheels.

• 39:48Speaker 03

  I'm gonna stretch my legs just a little bit.

• 39:54Speaker 04

  We step out of the truck onto the side of a road in Berghols.

• 39:59Speaker 03

  Oh, why they got all those stickers on the trees?

• 40:04Speaker 03

  Oh, that's my cousin Eli.

• 40:11Speaker 03

  Oh, he's not even gonna wave at me.

• 40:13Speaker 06

  So what just happened?

• 40:14Speaker 03

  Uh, my cousin Eli just went by and his horse and buggy and I waved and he kinda gave me a dirty look and kept going, so. Take that as not a welcome.

• 40:25Speaker 04

  We get back into the car and drive towards Sam's house.

• 40:29Speaker 03

  Working horses, that's actually.

• 40:32Speaker 04

  We pass Wooden Barns, the bulk food store. A rusted over cement mixer that the people of Berghols refashioned into sort of an incinerator where they burn garbage. City trash collection doesn't come out here. We pull up to a sprawling white farmhouse.

• 40:49Speaker 03

  Sam's house is here on the right.

• 40:53Speaker 06

  Is that where you guys used to live up there?

• 40:54Speaker 03

  That's where we used to live up there, yeah.

• 40:58Speaker 04

  Women peek out from behind the window shades, watching us.

• 41:01Speaker 03

  We'll just sneak on out again.

• 41:04Speaker 04

  Only the kids wave and smile back.

• 41:08Speaker 04

  We keep driving, past white houses with green roofing, laundry lines with white socks and sheets drying under the sun. I asked Johnny if he was ever scared riding his buggy on these roads.

• 41:23Speaker 03

  On a main road like this, yeah, it's scary for me. I mean...

• 41:27Speaker 06

  Wouldn't you say, though, that it's more scary now that you're actually not Amish anymore? And you see how dangerous it is? Like, when you're Amish, you don't really think about it that much, because it's just the way you've always done it. You don't really think about it being scary, because you just drive a horse and buggy.

• 41:41Speaker 04

  Clara's dad gave her a buggy ride a couple of weeks ago, and she was terrified.

• 41:45Speaker 06

  And the buggy would just seem so weak, like it could just fall apart. Or, like, he was just going down the road, and it just, I don't know, I was scared. I was like, oh, my gosh, I couldn't even do this anymore.

• 41:57Speaker 04

  Clara can't imagine putting her kids in a buggy these days. It just seems so dangerous.

• 42:04Speaker 06

  It's crazy, the point of view that you get after not being Amish. How much it changes, and how much you change.

• 42:19Speaker 04

  Johnny's changed so much since he left Burghols. When he was 23, he went back to school for his GED and graduated in just six months, which is remarkable, because he tested in with a third-grade reading level. He has very cute little daughters, and a partner who asks him tough questions, throws parties, and buys him mini cupcakes from Walmart every Valentine's Day.

• 42:44Speaker 06

  Normally, I'll just get him a whole big box, and he'll eat it all in one night, like, just for him. I'll get it for him, or I'll get it for him.

• 42:51Speaker 04

  But things are the same in Burghols. Even though Sam is in prison, Johnny says he's still in charge, from behind bars. He has new loyal men he's appointed as his liaisons. And apparently, Sam asked for another mass confessional. This time, he demanded people send their list to him in prison. Mail their sins to Sam in prison?

• 43:17Speaker 03

  Everybody in the whole community had to do it again.

• 43:20Speaker 04

  Wow, again.

• 43:20Speaker 03

  Again, everybody.

• 43:22Speaker 04

  And Sam is still in prison, though.

• 43:24Speaker 03

  Sam is still in prison.

• 43:25Speaker 04

  But he's still in charge?

• 43:27Speaker 03

  He's still in charge. He's always been.

• 43:29Speaker 04

  And last spring, Cousin Aiden said Levi Miller was cooped up again. What do you mean, cooped up?

• 43:37Speaker 03

  Cooped up. They had him out in a shack in the woods. It's back to the same thing.

• 43:41Speaker 04

  And back in the chicken coop, Levi was doing this weird thing. Like he was trying to send a message to Sam.

• 43:49Speaker 03

  He's sitting there making these circles. They keep telling him to write his sins down. They bring him a paper and a pen. And he sits there and just makes big circles on his paper. He doesn't do it to write anything on the paper. He just sits there and makes circles. I would bet money to what he's doing. He's basically telling Sam, "You're just going around in circles and circles. You're basically going around in a circle and you're back to where you were seven years ago. You're gonna make a full circle again."

• 44:15Speaker 04

  Now, we're back in the beginning, in this approval trap.

• 44:22Speaker 03

  Been there, done that, and didn't like it. Approval makes you do stuff you wish you wouldn't have done. Like I said earlier, I always wanted to have my grandfather's approval. So when I finally had it, I ended up doing stuff that I regret.

• 44:55Glynn Washington?

  Today, Johnny lives about 70 miles outside Birdholes in a small Ohio town where he shooes horses. His hair is short. Read more about the Birdholes community in the books "Break Away Amish" by Johnny Mast and Sean Smucker, and "Renegade Amish" by Don Craybill. Special thanks to David Luescher and the folks at WYSU in Youngstown, Ohio for letting us use their studio. And last we heard, Levi was no longer cooped up. The original score for that story was by Renzo Goryo. It was produced by Shayna Shealy.

• 45:35Glynn Washington?

  Now, it's about that time. But do you know where more Snap Judgment awaits? Wherever you get your podcasts. That's where. See, I just met a guy that listened to Snap the entire way from New York City to LA, then turned right back around and made the return trip, not because he had someplace to be, but because he loved the podcast so much. SnapJudgment.org. Snap was brought to you by the team that never, ever cuts their hair. Give it up for Rapunzel himself, the uber-producer Mark Ristich, mountain man Pat Massey Miller, and a mountain lady Sussman. Nancy Lopez shoots pool. Liz Mack shoots baskets. Adisa Egan shoots the messenger.

• 46:20Glynn Washington?

  Eliza Too Far Smith. Tail too tall to cock, Leon Momochi can't wait. Menzel Goryo can. Shayna Shealy knows the score, and Jasmine Aguilera has thoughts. On Team Snap, the union-represented producers, artists, editors, and engineers are members of the National Association of Broadcast Employees and Technicians, Communications Workers of America, AFL-CIO Local 51. Even though this is not the news, no waste this news. In fact, you could be in the back of a trailer, divvying up your money, only to realize, this ain't money. This world of cash is just old newspapers cutting the triangles, even while you hear

• 47:01Glynn Washington?

  the motorcycles roaring away in the distance, and you would still, still not be as far away from the news as this is. But this is PRX.

• 47:25Speaker 07

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