I Was a Punk for the FBI

Brian James Schill speaks with the founders of ‘Punk’ magazine on its 50th anniversary about whether they were surveilled by the feds.

By Brian James SchillFebruary 18, 2026

• Music

• Politics

• History

This essay is part of the Fine Print column, a series focused on uncovering the histories of small magazines and presses that had an outsize cultural impact.

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THE WATER IN John Holmstrom’s building is out again. Grumbling something about how some things never change, the New York–based writer and illustrator, now in his seventies, explains to me that the situation reminds him of the grubby nidus where he co-founded the original Punk magazine 50 years ago. “There was always the issue of that office being run-down and in a bad part of town, but it was also kind of a cool location,” he says of the 10th Avenue “Punk Dump” where, for a few febrile years in the 1970s, Holmstrom and his collaborators—“resident punk” Eddie (Legs) McNeil, publisher Ged Dunn Jr., photographer Roberta Bayley, associate publisher Elin Wilder, and future filmmaker Mary Harron—scratched out their irreverent zine.

While it would be an overstatement to claim that Holmstrom’s crew birthed punk rock as such, they undoubtedly drafted its articles of incorporation. Following the paradigm shift made possible by groups like the Velvet Underground, the Stooges, the Motor City Five (MC5), and Death in the late 1960s and early 1970s, a handful of underground rock scenes began to emerge across the United States. Actively dismissing what was already a tightly controlled pop marketplace, these often experimental “proto-punk” groups—Devo and Rocket from the Tombs in Ohio; the Modern Lovers in Massachusetts; and Television, Patti Smith, and the Dictators in New York—began cultivating a performance art that was as funny, frenetic, surreal, and raunchy as it was loud.

And confrontational. With John Waters fan Martin Rev on synth and drum machine and visual artist Alan Vega swinging a motorcycle chain around his head like a flail, New York’s Suicide, for example, sought to restage Antonin Artaud’s “Theatre of Cruelty” (“The spectator who comes to our theatre knows that he is to undergo a real operation in which not only his mind but his senses and his flesh are at stake,” Artaud had sneered in the late 1920s) within a broader pop milieu that seemed to be willfully ignoring the social collapse taking place in real time all around.

This was the aesthetic that attracted Holmstrom, a graphic artist from Connecticut who had moved to the big city in 1972 to attend the School of Visual Arts. Joined by his Nutmeg State mates McNeil and Dunn by 1975, the jeans-and-T-shirt trio, alienated from the decadence of both an increasingly disco-dominated pop culture and New York’s glam/glitter scene, began scheming a way of getting in on the ground floor of the deliberately amateurish—almost cartoonish—subculture that Vega had by now begun referring to as “punk.” If handled properly, they realized, punk just might become a stand-alone movement, something with enough staying power to change the world independent of Billboard and Sam Goody, record deals and rock stars.

As a microcosm of its gritty host city, which in 1975 was on the cusp of a credit default, the Punk Dump was “dangerous and it was filthy,” says Wilder, referencing the Son of Sam murders and Taxi Driver (1976). “It was not a nice place.” This seedy atmosphere contributed not only to the antiestablishment magazine’s production aesthetic but also to the public reception of the subculture that its writers, photographers, and filmmakers tasked themselves with documenting.

By 1975, the team had already started hanging out at the few spartan clubs in Lower Manhattan that would host acts like Smith and Suicide, including Hilly Kristal’s Country Bluegrass and Blues (CBGB), chatting up performers and fans, and posting flyers that read “PUNK is coming” in a bid to generate interest in a magazine that, despite an initial $5,000 investment from Dunn, had yet to publish a thing.

Leaning hard into its host city’s brutal decomposition, Punk no. 1, when it arrived, served as a manifesto of sorts, embodying the era’s fatalism and aggravating libs and prigs alike: subsequent issues featured foulmouthed pieces like “Personality ANALysis via Fartology,” a “talking tits” comic, and an explicit review of Michael Gross’s more explicit book I, a Groupie (1975), backed with sometimes blundering interviews with acts like Lou Reed and Blondie.

“Oh, people hated punk,” says Holmstrom, recalling the disquieting impact that punk had on Mayor Abraham Beame’s New York. “Every other rock movement—acid rock, glam rock—you would have an initial wave of disgust from your parents or your big brother. Then, after a while, you get enough popularity and overcome it all. That never happened with punk. We were universally rejected by everyone.”

Which was a good thing, says Holmstrom, since the negativity directed at punk (and Punk) made it not only unique in American pop culture but also an actual threat to the American state. He bases this assessment on the fact that his zine was surveilled, if not infiltrated, by federal agents of one sort or another soon after its messy birth.

Six issues into their enterprise, in August 1976, the Punk crew was somehow breaking even on newsstands and fielding calls from major record labels and the establishment press. Convinced that both Punk and “punk” were on the cusp of reorienting the nation’s pop scene and its social values, Holmstrom’s team took seriously Voltaire’s charge to “ecrasez l’infâme,” as Holmstrom had scrawled on the Punk no. 1 masthead.

Then, with the speed of a Ramones song, it was over—impossibly so in the absence of some coordinated act of sabotage, says Holmstrom. “We just had so many weird problems,” he observes, sounding less paranoid than perspicacious and referencing COINTELPRO, the FBI’s counterintelligence program that targeted putatively seditious groups. “There’s enough red flags that even if we don’t have a smoking gun, there’s evidence.”

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In a way, he’d seen it coming. By the summer of 1976, Holmstrom and Dunn were effectively estranged. Exasperated by how his publisher had exhausted the magazine’s initial $5,000 investment over the course of five issues, Holmstrom says that Dunn was by this time actively undermining its production. He had done so in part by switching to a “ridiculously expensive” new printer called Mariner Press and pushing a deal with Thomas King Forçade.

Already infamous for his exploits in the early 1970s—trafficking narcotics to and from Mexico via airplane, managing the Underground Press Syndicate (UPS), founding Orpheus and High Times magazines, pieing American politicos in the face on television, and founding the militant Zippie wing of Abbie Hoffman’s Youth International Party—Forçade allegedly found in Punk a like-minded confederacy well positioned to upend American culture. “Forçade was not a hippie,” Holmstrom chirps approvingly of the suitor who always seemed flush with cash:

Forçade was a big fan of the MC5. Had roadied for them. When he saw Punk magazine, he fell in love with it. At one point, he actually went in and tried to shut down High Times, because he could see it was passé. He really thought Punk had a chance to be huge.

Initially enamored of the attention his zine was receiving from a living legend, Holmstrom was nonetheless guarded around Dunn’s new patron. But even he didn’t grasp at the time the degree to which Forçade (an alias, pronounced like “façade”) was believed by many to be a government informant. By 1972, more than one pundit had wondered as much, aghast at how Forçade had repeatedly evaded prosecution for drug trafficking and coordinating a long Zippie riot during the almost overlapping Republican and Democratic National Conventions in Miami in 1972—to which he’d brought controlled substances and a gun, and from which he stole an eight-foot-tall portrait of LBJ, using a police cruiser as a getaway car.

Anticipating Allen Ginsberg’s quip that “if [the Zippies] weren’t paid for by the CIA or the Watergate people, [they] might just as well have served the same purpose,” Allen Katzman, one of the co-managers of Forçade’s UPS, theorized as early as 1973 that Forçade seemed to be “working for the FBI” in some capacity. Referencing Forçade’s deal with intelligence-adjacent imaging firm Bell & Howell to produce microfilm copies of UPS papers for public libraries, Katzman, too, argued that “the only service the Underground Press Syndicate can talk about with any pride is that it has served as a complete record of [New Left] information for the FBI.”

Tired of aggravating hippies and Yippies, Forçade brought his well-protected provocations—including his affiliation with Detroit-based White Panther Party chair and MC5 manager John Sinclair—to Punk, says Holmstrom, knocking on the Dump door right as the increasingly fractured team was considering its future. Ruffling $100 bills in the faces of the Punk staff, Forçade and Dunn pitched an offer the magazine couldn’t refuse: High Times would front $1,600 (nearly $10,000 today) for the right to publish an eight-page Punk supplement in High Times and would subsidize the next stand-alone issue of Punk.

What Forçade, who died in 1978 of an allegedly self-inflicted gunshot, stood to gain from the deal wasn’t entirely clear. “I didn’t know who Tom Forçade was,” remembers Wilder, who later worked at NBC and on the original Gossip Girl TV show (2007–12). “He showed up one day, in the darkness of night, and I was like, ‘Who is this? What’s happening?’ He was a very clandestine, shady character.”

Dubious of Forçade but also desperate for cash, Holmstrom went along with a deal that Dunn had already made with the provocateur. Looking to up the ante on Punk as a cultural document, then, and seeing Forçade’s investment as their only hope, Holmstrom’s team got to work on Punk no. 6, producing a punk-noir photo-comic that starred a cast of CBGB regulars.

The result was “The Legend of Nick Detroit,” a deliberately campy potboiler about a “former government agent” coaxed out of forced retirement (for having “killed 966 people in the line of duty”) to solve the series of murders of undercover police agents in some crime-ridden American metropolis. Reveling in the era’s ultraviolence, Richard Hell’s Nick Detroit easily tops 1,000 killings—including of Debbie Harry—by zine’s end. The comic, financed by Forçade and published in October 1976, was a radical contribution to the United States’ avant-garde and served as a spec script for what some at Punk hoped might be a recurring series.

But it wasn’t to be. “It bombed,” groans Holmstrom of the last issue his team would produce that year. “There were reports that it was the worst-selling magazine of all time.” Reviewing the receipts, says Holmstrom, Forçade ghosted Punk, abandoning the New York punks as quickly as he’d pitched them.

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Then things got weirder. “People would just show up at the Dump,” laughs Wilder. “We had this Elvis impersonator show up one time.” And she started noticing an odd tick every time she used the Dump phone. “I do know that the phones were tapped,” Wilder says of the immediate aftermath of Forçade’s arrival. “You could always hear a little click click click. We used to scream into the phone ‘Are you listening?!’”

Around this time, the magazine was blessed/cursed with another curious windfall. “Mysteriously,” says Holmstrom of the several months between “Nick Detroit” and the February 1977 release of both Punk no. 7 and the High Times supplement, “this guy, a friend of Legs’s, shows up: Tom Katz.”

The illustrator explains his magazine’s winter of 1976–77 this way: benefiting from a financial settlement courtesy of a wrongful death lawsuit triggered when his brother was killed in Detroit, Tom Katz needed to escape the Motor City and find a way to do something meaningful with his dividends. Descending from some sticky Greyhound steps at a New York Metro station, according to Holmstrom, Katz allegedly saw a flyer for Punk’s “Nick Detroit” issue—“We probably posted a few near Penn Station”—and was intrigued. “He claimed the money was because his brother was a Detroit policeman and was shot in the line of duty,” Holmstrom says. “So this was money from his brother’s death benefit, and he just wanted to throw it away.”

“It” being $20,000—the equivalent of more than $100,000 today. In exchange, Katz asked for a partial ownership stake in Punk and a role as circulation manager. This meant, Holmstrom reminds me, decision-making authority for the magazine’s operations and direct access to Punk’s growing subscriber list. Asked if any of this seemed odd at the time—almost too resonant of “Nick Detroit”—Holmstrom shrugs. “You’re right,” he says. “But [Katz] was a good guy, charismatic, got along with people. And we were so happy to get 20 grand.”

Then Holmstrom learned that Dunn had reached out to Forçade without his knowledge to develop a follow-up deal with High Times. “I was like, ‘Over my dead body,’” Holmstrom says. Knowing that Katz held a controlling interest in the zine, Holmstrom arranged an ownership meeting with himself, Dunn, and Katz. Siding with Holmstrom, Katz voted to strip Dunn of his title. Furious, Dunn refused the demotion and quit the magazine entirely, making Katz Punk’s publisher.

Katz was, at this time, also becoming good friends with McNeil, with whom he was living on Staten Island. It was then that Katz opened up about his past. His given name was Kent Aitchison, and yes, he was from the Detroit area. To prove it, he shared with McNeil the “secret service report of the car accident”—McNeil’s words—which Holmstrom learned of later: papers related to an automobile incident he’d been involved in about a year before arriving in New York.

After a layover in Detroit to raise funds for Oakland County Executive Daniel Murphy in 1975, the former and future presidential candidate—and then-current Rockefeller Commission member—Ronald Reagan needed to catch a flight out of DTW. To that end, two Oakland County “security” personnel were tasked with driving Reagan to the airport. But something went awry. Putting the story on the front page of its April 28, 1975, edition, the Detroit Free Press noted how “former California Gov. Ronald Reagan was pulled over Sunday morning by Taylor [Michigan] police who ticketed his driver and the driver of an escorting security car for reckless driving.”

Reagan’s driver was Kent B. Aitchison.

The Taylor PD report of the incident confirms that an officer named Grogitsky pursued two vehicles after they sped past him on Interstate 94 in Michigan, traveling 82 in a 55 mph zone. After running a check on the vehicles, Grogitsky learned that no one from either the Wayne County or the Oakland County sheriff’s or police departments had requested escort assistance for Reagan. Furthermore, the Wayne County Airport Authority “had no record or contact with Oakland County Security.” So Grogitsky ticketed both defendants.

Calling Aitchison a “21-year-old part-time college student,” the AP later reported that he had worked on Murphy’s campaign and that his license had been suspended twice previously. To save face, Aitchison, who in 1972 had campaigned for Michigan’s incumbent Republican senator Robert P. Griffin and later lost in his own campaign for youth vice chairman of the Michigan Republican Party, resigned from his “security post” with the Oakland County Treasurer’s Office “with deep regret of the incident that occurred April 27.”

No matter. Five months later, both defendants’ records were clean. The drivers pleaded innocent and took Grogitsky to court, reported the AP on September 17, 1975, adding that municipal court judge Anthony Nicita “dismissed the charges Monday on grounds the facts did not warrant a charge or conviction.”

The exoneration came two weeks after Aitchison’s brother Milton William Aitchison Jr. had died in the Detroit area—but not necessarily in the line of duty. Giving credence to Holmstrom’s suspicions is the fact that FOIA requests with the City of Detroit, the Oakland County Sheriff’s Office in Michigan, and the FBI for records on the 1975 service and/or death of a former agent or officer surnamed Aitchison were determined nonresponsive, meaning no such person was on file with state or federal authorities.

Exactly when Kent Aitchison surfaced in New York calling himself Tom Katz and angling for a direct line into the Forçade-financed and MC5- and White Panther–adjacent Punk magazine is unclear. What is clear, according to Holmstrom, is that, after offering Punk big money in exchange for a big job at the magazine in late 1976, and helping to oust Dunn, Katz began dismantling Punk like an old pro.

Holmstrom says that, after completing the artwork and layout for Punk no. 9 in March 1977, he took an extended trip overseas, leaving the magazine in Katz’s hands. The artist returned a few weeks later to a pile of wreckage, learning from Katz that Mariner Press had taken Punk’s money and proofs of issue no. 9 and disappeared.

“When I left, we had blueprints,” Holmstrom recalls bitterly, adding that Katz, in Holmstrom’s and Dunn’s absence, had encouraged Punk staff to spend their afternoons playing pinball and drinking instead of working, had hired staff who proceeded to use the tapped Dump phone to traffic drugs, and had tried to move operations from the Dump to a more expensive HQ. “Instead, I came back and there was a dead rat in front of the office. The office was a wreck and Katz said, ‘Well, we went out of business.’” He still kicks himself for not running straight to the printer. “I’m like, ‘I’m going down there,’” Holmstrom frowns, “but Katz was like, ‘No, no, take my word for it.’”

Such obfuscations culminated in Katz almost losing another $2,200 earmarked for Punk from the two-night fundraiser he’d helped organize in May 1977. Allegedly guilt-ridden about the Mariner fiasco, Katz got to work coordinating a benefit concert featuring Blondie, the Patti Smith Group, Suicide, and Richard Hell’s Voidoids at CBGB in May 1977. The show was a success and Kristal cut Punk a $2,200 check. “Legs, Tom, and I met for a slice of pizza before going to the bank,” Holmstrom wrote in the 2012 anthology The Best of Punk Magazine of the morning after the benefit. “Tom Katz hid the check in a newspaper for safekeeping. We ate the pizza, jubilant that we had saved the magazine, and left. We walked for a few blocks, and as we approached the bank, someone asked Tom where the check was.”

As Holmstrom recounted the incident for me, Katz appeared panicked, and, with something of a Wilhelm scream, reported he’d thrown the newspaper away. “The way he suddenly remembered that he didn’t have it on him anymore—and we had walked about a mile away from the pizza place,” Holmstrom says, “made me suspicious it wasn’t an accident.” Backtracking nearly one mile through New York streets, the punks found the check in the restaurant’s garbage bin.

“Why would someone put 20,000 into a company and then run it into the ground?” Holmstrom asks rhetorically. “That doesn’t make any sense.”

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Decades later, none of the above bothers McNeil. “John is always looking for someone to blame other than himself,” he scoffs, adding curiously that, even if Katz was an operative, “he was corrupted by us too easily! He went on to have a high-paying job at GM. And he loved [McNeil’s 1996 book] Please Kill Me, so if he was an informant, he had good taste.”

While she remains skeptical as well, Wilder at least appreciates Holmstrom’s argument. “I saw issue nine. I know it went to the printer. I know it didn’t get printed,” she says. “Why there was money that couldn’t be paid, or why money hadn’t been paid, or why [tasks] hadn’t been done is a bone of contention.”

Also controversial is the origin and fate of Mariner Press (not to be confused with the HarperCollins imprint Mariner Books). Documents from the New York State Division of Corporations (DOC) give Mariner an incorporation date of March 2, 1976—a few months preceding Forçade’s Punk pitch. Listing a Brooklyn address, Mariner’s certificate of incorporation shows “Nicholas DeAugustinis” as the firm’s incorporator. For reasons that remain unclear, Mariner was “dissolved by declaration” by the State of New York in 1982—five years after the printer had allegedly “disappeared.”

Although virtually nothing else is known about either Mariner or its principal, an FBI request for information on said incorporator was returned with a caution that “the FBI will neither confirm nor deny the existence of such records” insofar as the “mere acknowledgement of the existence of FBI records on third party individuals could reasonably be expected to constitute an unwarranted invasion of personal privacy.”

McNeil, a writer and filmmaker whose documentary Pusherman: Frank Lucas & The True Story of American Gangster was screened in 2025, waves such speculations away. “He thought Holmstrom was crazy,” McNeil says of Katz, who died (as Kent Aitchison) in Michigan in 2018, “and Holmstrom was crazy and didn’t need any help from the CIA to self-destruct Punk magazine.” Adding that she knew Katz well and “worked with Tom every single day” in 1976–77, Wilder wonders why the state would have taken any interest in Punk. Even so, she adds, the arrival of the two Toms “just took the whole thing off the rails.”

Holmstrom’s lead photographer agrees, even as she sees her former colleague’s point. Recalling the time in 1978 when she and Holmstrom were themselves accused of state sympathies, Roberta Bayley just sighs. “There was that weird moment on the Sex Pistols tour when these Warner Brothers roadie guys wouldn’t let us go into the Winterland [Ballroom] show and started calling us CIA agents,” Bayley says of the Pistols’ San Francisco gig, which Forçade had asked Holmstrom to cover, offering to produce an issue of Punk (no. 14) dedicated to the band’s American tour. “Look: John Lennon was very surveilled and the hippies were very surveilled. I grew up in that period, so maybe Punk was too.”

Confirming Bayley’s account, Holmstrom adds that, despite the humiliation of being denied entry to a show they were tasked with covering, the journalists thought they should at least check out the gig’s after-party. “[S]o we walked over,” he wrote. “On the way, a carload of Warner Brothers security goons drove by with their leader”—Pistols’ American tour manager Noel Monk—“leading the way.” Slowing as if preparing a rolling assassination, the car slid its windows down, Holmstrom recalls, and out came a chorus of catcalls: “CIA! CIA! CIA!”

“I thought [the Pistols] were great, but we wanted nothing to do with that political stance of the Clash and the Pistols,” Holmstrom tells me. “We were more down with Eddie and the Hot Rods and the Damned. The Ramones, who were cultural, not political. I still hate politics. It’s just so boring.”

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He’s not wrong. But as any underground band from the 1970s and 1980s can attest, politics never considered punk boring. Johnny Rotten’s claim that the state was surveilling him notwithstanding, the MC5, Stooges, and Ramones—who in 1976 joked in “Havana Affair” about being “a guide for the CIA” in Cuba—were all harassed by undercover agents, as were Black Flag and X in Los Angeles and some of the Washington, DC, scenesters who built Dischord Records.

“Chris Stein told me that there was a jazz festival on the White House lawn,” Holmstrom muses of the June 1978 festival that President Jimmy Carter hosted in the capital just as punk was reaching its apex in the United States and United Kingdom, “and Carter was heard to say, ‘We’ve got to stamp out this punk rock thing.’” Corroborating Holmstrom is New Musical Express writer Paul Morley, who quoted the Blondie guitarist claiming that he “was told by a pretty heavy rock person that Jimmy Carter has actually put a stop to the new wave ’cos he considers it politically dangerous.”

Stein’s evidence? “Kids tell us they ask for Blondie records on their local radio station and are told the stations don’t play new wave,” he told Morley of the comment allegedly overheard at the White House Jazz Festival. “There’s just been one new wave hit, the Patti Smith song. Nothing else. Everything in America is set.” Meaning, Stein said, “it’s just a fucking big system […] there’s very little room to change it.”

All of this is why, despite the fact that several investigators have uncovered no documentary evidence that either Katz, DeAugustinis, or Mariner was in any way state-aligned, Holmstrom remains unmoved. “To me,” he deadpans with a reference to Thomas Paine’s Common Sense (1776) and the US Senate’s 1976 Church Committee reports, “the idea that they weren’t spying on us is more preposterous than the idea that they were.”

Acknowledging Wilder’s and Bayley’s doubt that the state would take an interest in a patchy joke magazine in 1976—“It was a humor magazine!” Bayley insists—Holmstrom suggests that punk was targeted not because it was explicitly political but because it nonetheless made the state appear, if not trivial or corrupt, then simply redundant. The punk ethos assumed—in a waning empire’s most decrepit city, which had, by 1975, ceded its power to the private market—that the administrations of Beame and Carter, of former New York governor Hugh Carey (who willfully exacerbated New York’s homeless problem), and of Gerald Ford (who in 1975 turned his back on NYC) were the real obscenity, the actual nihilism.

Front-loading this assumption in its founding documents, Punk magazine—and, yes, punk too—did challenge convention in a profound way, admits Mary Harron. “I remember Holmstrom saying ‘Embrace the mistake,’” the filmmaker tells me, explaining how punk directly influenced her approach to cinema. “We’ve done something wrong, but embrace the accident. It’s what I would call high-low. And I think high-low is my natural aesthetic.”

This willingness to embrace mistakes and demand something better from the world while actively working to produce it—“You’re doing jump cuts; you’re embracing a certain roughness,” adds the director of I Shot Andy Warhol (1996) and American Psycho (2000). “There was just a very practical do-it-yourself attitude”—mattered in a city and nation that were literally crumbling. “It was so underground and so disapproved-of by the outside world,” says Harron. “That punk would have this worldwide impact, that it would go worldwide and that, 50 years later, I would see people on the streets of the East Village who looked like Richard Hell or Sid Vicious—I would never have imagined that.”

This, concludes Holmstrom, was ultimately what the state feared most. “They were worried punk would get out of hand like the hippie thing got out of hand,” he says. “I figured, okay, we’re going to pretend to be conservative—just troll everybody.” But it didn’t work, he says. “They still came after us. The Democrats put me out of business, and 10 years later, the Republicans wanted to put me in jail.”

And some things never change.

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Featured image: Roberta Bayley, [Photograph of John Holmstrom and Joey Ramone seated at a table drinking and playing with lit candles], ca. 1970s. John Holmstrom Papers and Punk Magazine Records. General Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University (15236544). Public access, archives.yale.edu. Accessed February 13, 2026. Image has been cropped.