I am Toni Hart and I am a storyteller. I tell my stories in performance in New York City and if my audience likes them, I turn the stories into books or podcasts. Now I’m telling them on YouTube.
I Want the Sixties Back I came to New York in 1963 when the living was easy and more than the cotton was high. People ask me what New York was like in the Sixties and I tell them “paradise.” I found a two bedroom apartment in Greenwich Village for $74 a month. I heard Jimi Hendrix play “Foxy Lady” for the price of a beer. I ran errands for Bobby De Niro, I went to parties with Al Pacino and I followed Jim Morrison and his black leather pants through the clubs. I hung out with the bike gang that became the Hells Angels. I worked as a fashion model for Eileen Ford until I got hungry. I toured as a stand-up comic. I went to graduate school at Columbia University. I heard every rock band that came through New York City at the Fillmore East, Janis shared a bill with the Dead, Joni Mitchell with Crosby, Stills and Nash, the Airplane with the Byrds, 5 bucks a show. New York City was paradise.
Angleton and the CIA is the story of my uncle, James Angleton, the man who built and ran CIA Counterintelligence from 1954 to 1975. During World War II, Jim trained under MI6 in Britain, yes, the “Tinker Tailer Soldier Spy” people, to become the head of OSS in Italy. Jim was an espionage genius. He and his “gang” were said to have “captured” over 1000 Nazis. It was that reputation that allowed Jim to build CIA Counterintelligence. He retained his wartime methods, breaking rules as he saw fit. Jim set up secret operations that flouted US law, wiretapped half of Washington, D.C. and hired and fired CIA personnel as he saw fit. It was his relationship with Kim Philby, one of his teachers at MI6 and the most vicious double agent in history, that destroyed his power. Philby, secretly on the payroll of the KGB, played Jim to obtain CIA and FBI intelligence after the war and produced a paranoia that sent Jim careening through the CIA on a mission to unearth a mole, one that might not have existed. Jim nearly destroyed his own creation, CIA Counterintelligence.
Gun Culture USA is my story of growing up with a violent right-wing father. My father was a doctor in Minnesota after World War II. He was so violent the people in my hometown feared he would become a shooter. They forced us to leave town in what is considered a small-town vigilante action. They boycotted my father’s medical practice and tore down a house he was building. My father refused to leave. He wanted revenge, revenge for crimes against him no one had committed. It took three years to make him leave, during which we were often homeless. Dad finally took a job as a physician on an Army hospital base. At last, we had a place to live. I am telling this story because I hope I can help people understand extremely violent men.
Substack When I was in graduate school at Columbia University, I got into the habit of writing short papers. I liked the habit, so I kept it up. Substack is the website I post the papers on.
Thank you for reading my home page. I hope you like my stories.
All material is Copyright © 2018 Antoinette Hart Wellman
Toni Hart 