Jan's Conspiracy¶
Jan's Conspiracy was the ring, led by Spud Hut manager Jan Martense, that mined gold with the labor of captive ape-men beneath Dahlonega, Georgia, and used fake Bigfoot sightings as cover.
| Type | Criminal conspiracy |
| Aliases | The gold-mining ring |
| Leader | Jan Martense |
| Base | Spud Hut Georgia Regional Distribution Center and the Dahlonega Gold Mines |
| Status | Collapsed; Jan is in CIA custody (as of Walkers 01) |
| First named | Appalachia 09 |
Overview¶
In Appalachia 09, Clive, the large-animal handler, described the conspiracy as five people: Jan, Clive himself, a mercenary who melted the gold down, and two bodyguards ("Five was the biggest conspiracy you could possibly keep"). Its goal was at least $100 million in gold, dug by a "shift" of ape-men kept docile with ketamine. Clive said Jan insisted on that figure and that he himself would have settled for one or two million (Appalachia 09). The Spud Hut distribution center served as the front, and its trucks hauled the dirt away.
The ring also manufactured the Bigfoot hoax. Clive explained that some of the workers had escaped and been seen, and that Jan staged fake sightings to discredit the real ones (Appalachia 09).
Members¶
- Jan Martense, the Spud Hut manager and head of the operation. His one condition of employment, as Clive tells it, was "Don't ask questions about the ape-men."
- Clive, the large-animal handler who trained the ape-men for a promised third of the gold. He survived and guided the party out of the tunnels.
- The mercenary, who melted the gold into bars and supposedly "put down" escaped ape-men. When the party described the dead man in the Chewbacca costume, shot in the back of the head and carrying ex-military tattoos, Clive confirmed that he was this man; who shot him is only assumed (Appalachia 09). See Troy Cleaver and the Chewbacca costume.
- Two bodyguards, never seen. Their fate is never established.
- Clyde Harvard, a Spud Hut accountant. Jan named him in his interview as the one other person who knew ("That was necessary"), so he was a knowing outsider rather than one of Clive's five (Walkers 01).
History¶
During the arc the party gradually uncovered the ring: the odd dirt trucks and the savant counter worker at the Spud Hut, the Bigfoot sightings, and the hidden tunnel beneath the plant. In Appalachia 08 Jan sent the party to wait in a "break room" that was never a break room, only a door with caged ape-men behind it, and the ape-men came out. In Appalachia 09 the party fought through the shift with Clive's help, and he showed them a gold room with hundreds of pounds of cast bars, about half already gone. The episode opens with Jan leaving the building in a red pickup with a large animal crate (Appalachia 09).
Unrecorded session
The finale, Appalachia 10, was never recorded. It is known only from the epilogue in Walkers 01, where Jan is held at Black Site Omaha with stitches and bruising from the climax, in which he was shot and then crushed by a falling ape that broke his skull.
In that interview, Kurt put it to Jan that the team had been meant to die, and Jan agreed. Hiring the animal handler, he said, had halved his take and doubled the risk of a leak, but he could not manage the ape-men alone. The ape-men were used because they were strong, could recognize gold, and meant no contractors were needed. Jan planned to melt the gold, sell it to a dealer, and work out the laundering later through acquaintances. Kurt assumed Jan had "taken care of" the mercenary in the woods (Walkers 01).