Crime One
Pollution
Crimes
Charlie Koch didn't steal all the Osage oil. Some his crews dumped into creeks and rivers. Koch let pipes crack, spewing murderous poisons. Koch Oil was indicted for over 315 counts of felonious criminal polluting. And walked away smelling like a rose.
We reveal the inside story of how Koch bought and bullied his way out of these crimes — from having Koch thugs impersonate an FBI agent to terrorize a whistleblower, to running counterintelligence operations against the Feds, to slipping millions through “Triad,” a corporate front.
How did he get away with it? The Kochs bought themselves a Congress and pleasured a Supreme Court Justice. And they simply had Congress and the Court make their crimes legal.
Crime Two
Climate
Crimes
16,000
Abandoned wells spewing methane on Osage land
8,000%
More damaging to the climate than CO₂
After Koch and Big Oil — Getty, Sinclair and Exxon — sucked billions in petroleum from the Osage Reservation, they left the Tribe with 16,000 abandoned wells spewing chemicals and methane. There is nothing worse for the climate than methane.
“Now how do you allow a company to just walk away like that?”
— Everett Waller, Osage Minerals Council
“Let's not beat around the bush.
This is occupied territory.”
— Principal Chief Geoffrey Standing Bear
Crime Three
The Crimes of the
Killers of the
Flower Moon
In the 1870s, starvation and smallpox killed 90% of the tribe. After oil was discovered, by 1919 the Osage had become, per capita, the richest people in the world. Then the killings began.
Long Knife is the documentary sequel to Killers of the Flower Moon — the Martin Scorsese masterpiece about the 200 Osage murdered for their oil. We uncover hard new facts about this Reign of Terror.
A Century of Theft
History is ever-present. The crimes of the Kochs were foretold in the Trail of Tears, which ended with the Osage expulsion from Kansas after robber baron Jay Gould convinced Congress to let him buy the Osage reservation for just 12 cents an acre. It was a scandal even then.
In Oklahoma, Chief Bigheart wrote down their Constitution — democratically elected Chief, all land held in common. Congress revoked it, replaced Bigheart with a council of oil men, and chopped the land into 2,000 parcels. The easier to steal and cheat the Osage out of their oil. And to kill those who resisted.
For a century, until 2006, the oil men ruled over the Osage. J. Paul Getty became the richest man in the world from the oil land he bought from the Osage for $500.
The Kochs invented nothing new.