This episode of Swindled contains descriptions of sexual assault and sexual misconduct.

Listener discretion is advised.

The story begins when he was a teenage student living on a pittance in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania

right near the heart of what was once a great industrial area.

His neighbor, I'm mostly quoting now, his neighbor was a woman in her 80s.

Surviving on cat food, the widowed wife of a retired steel worker.

Her husband had worked all his life in the steel mills of Central Pennsylvania with promises

from big business and the union that for the 30 years of his service he would have a pension

and medical care to look forward to in his retirement.

Instead he was one of the thousands who got nothing because the incompetent mill management

and corrupt union and not to mention the government raided the pension funds and stole their

retirement.

All she had was social security to live on and Stack could have added that there are concerted

and continuing efforts by the super rich and their political allies to take even that

away on the spurious grounds.

Stack decided then that he couldn't trust big business and would strike out on his own

only to discover that he couldn't trust the government that cared nothing about people

like him but only about the rich and privileged.

Andrew Joseph Stack III was so tired of eating peanut butter and bread for dinner.

The stereotypical poor college student was sick being poor so he dropped out of school

and moved to Silicon Valley which in the early 80s was on the cusp of a technological revolution.

It was the perfect place to be for what Joe Stack wanted to be, a software engineer.

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