I had been

we've been blessed, I suppose, is the word of our collaborations.

Four of them have made the New York Times bestsellers list.

And our mantra, so to speak, is we like to take the lives of ordinary men who rise to extraordinary circumstances in wartime.

Now, in this case, with Pete Ortiz and the Phantom, he was a pretty extraordinary man to start with.

But for the most part, whether it's the sailors who sailed into Halsey's Typhoon, whether it was the Marines who were routed at the Chosen Reservoir, whether it was the Rangers who took the cliffs at Normandy Beach.

We are just fascinated by untold stories.

okay he worked for the oss running guns

No.

And that was during World War II.

Eisenhower, General Eisenhower, was looking for a way to get spy saboteurs into Na- Nazi-occupied Europe.

And so we thought, "Hey, here's a good book, the Jedburghs." I never heard of them.

But wherever we went and wherever we researched about the Jedburghs, this guy Pete Ortiz, who was a Marine who had been co-opted by the OSS and made to w- that's a precursor of the CIA, of course, and Pete Ortiz got there first.

He got into North Africa first behind Nazi lines.

He got into France first, twice behind Nazi lines.

Okay.

Oh,

we're gonna take a funnel and put some kind of poison in his penis.

That's what we're gonna do to him when we catch this guy.

So he's just sitting at the bar smiling.

And finally, one of the Germans says a toast to the death to that Jew lover Franklin Roosevelt.

He's listen, a toast.

to the death of his Jew-loving wife, Eleanor Roosevelt.

He never did until he was much, much, much

Is it pronounced Das Phantom?

Well, he, the Germans, he was, uh...

This, this guy was, uh, unbelievable.

I, I can't believe that his story is not better well-known, if well-known at all, until our book came out.

But he, he was a Marine.

Well, first of all, he was French Foreign...

He was an American, joined the French Foreign Legion, ran away, wild child.

Right.

So how then does the story of The Phantom come across? Who saw it, and how did you s- how did you come to find it?

This guy, I mean, uh, the fact that this guy, that we stumbled across this story of Pete Ortiz, a Marine who was co-opted by the OSS, which of course was the precursor to today's CIA, and then s- drops behind Nazi lines, first in North Africa, and then in France several times.

I...

We couldn't believe that we found this story.

I mean, this guy should be as famous as, I don't know, Sergeant York or Audie Murphy, and the fact that nobody's ever written about this guy.

What happened was, I'll try to keep this short, there's a Eisenhower kind of...

He, he wasn't...

[laughs]

Talk about some of the missions that Wild Bill, or that, uh, rather, uh, uh, Pete Ortiz went on.

Well, when he went in, and first of all, we got the name for our book, The Nazis, because when Pete would drop in, he would...

He had two uniforms.

One, he- whenever he was on a mission, uh, blowing up a troop, a troop train, uh, training, uh, the French Resistance to, uh, hit munitions dump, uh, perhaps escorting Allied, shot-down Allied pilots to neutral Spain, he would always wear his Marine uniform.

And the Gestapo was well aware, "There's this Marine running behind, running about behind our lines.

Who is this guy?" And they started calling him Das Phantom.

And they put a 500,000, well, 500,000, 500,000 franc bounty on his head, and they could not catch this guy.

Ooh

And so the two armies met at the Battle of Monmouth Courthouse, and what the British discovered is that whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger.

Well, I'm backing up, 'cause I paid Klavon 100 bucks to let me talk about the Baron Friedrich Wilhelm Ludolf Gerhard Augustin von Steuben.

Von Steuben to you and me.

The Baron von Steuben arrived in Valley Forge at the end of February as ostentatiously as he could.

He was in a sleigh adorned with 24 jingle bells, pulled by a team of Percheron horses he had purchased in France, coal black to make a good entrance into Valley Forge, and he had borrowed the money to purchase the horses, 'cause he was dead flat broke.

This guy, he's my fav- well, uh, Tom mentioned John, John Laurens, the, the Founding Father you never heard of, because he died too young.

Uh, there's Mad Anthony Wayne.

[laughs]