David McGowan, August 2001
Paul and Shirley Eberle wrote The Politics of Child Abuse, a book that accuses mothers, mental health professionals, and prosecutors of feeding children stories about sexual abuse. Since the book was published by Lyle Stuart in l986, the Eberles have been cited as experts in sexual abuse trials . What is startling about the Eberles' reputation as ground-breaking experts in the field is that their dubious credentials have not been widely challenged . Their publication, Finger, depicted scenes of bondage, S & M, and sexual activities involving urination and defecation. A young girl portrayed with a wide smile on her face sits on top of a man whose penis is inside of her; a woman has oral sex with a young boy in a drawing entitled 'Memories of My Boyhood'. - Ms. Magazine, December 1988
While the size and scope of pedophile rings have grown rapidly in recent years, America, as it turns out, has long been a nation whose laws were friendly to purveyors of child pornography. It was just twenty-five years ago, in 1978, that the very first federal statute on child pornography was passed into law. While forbidding production and sale, the statute placed no restrictions at all on the possession or trade of such materials. New laws enacted in 1984 forbid the trade of child pornography regardless of whether any money changed hands, though possession remained legal. In fact, as recently as 1990, private possession of child pornography was legal in 44 of the 50 states, despite the inescapable fact that all such materials were, by necessity, illegally produced and/or illegally obtained.
Technology has for some time now played a key role in greatly expanding the availability of child pornography. The Polaroid camera, for example, eliminated the need for child pornographers to have access to complicit photo labs. Home video cameras did likewise for moving images. Personal computers, digital cameras, web cams, scanners, and - most notably - the Internet, have vastly expanded the reach of child pornography networks. In the age of the Internet, child pornography is a booming business. The Los Angeles Times noted in December 1999 that: "the number of investigations for Internet-related child pornography is soaring. The FBI launched 1,125 such inquiries this year, more than twice as many as last year."
In the wake of this rising tide, the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals issued a ruling on December 17, 1999 that struck a serious blow to the prosecution of child pornography cases. As the Times reported, the decision stipulated, "the government cannot prohibit computer-generated sexual images that only appear to be pictures of children." A later report noted that appeals court judge Donald Molloy had stated that the First Amendment bars the government from criminalizing the generation of "images of fictitious children engaged in imaginary but explicit sexual conduct." As a result of the court's decision, prosecutors were thereafter "barred from bringing virtual-child pornography cases in California and the eight other Western states within the jurisdiction of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals."
As critics have noted, graphics technology now available to the general public is so sophisticated that it is virtually impossible to determine if an image has been digitally altered, and therefore if any actual children were involved in the generation of the image. U.S. Justice Department lawyers argued that very point, noting that the "government may find it impossible in many cases to prove that a pornographic image is of a real child." Any good defense attorney, in other words, could raise reasonable doubt as to the authenticity of an image. It could in fact be argued that all such computer images "only appear to be pictures of children." Computer images are not in fact photos, but are digital computer files that display as a facsimile of the original photo. A sound legal argument could be made that all digitally transferred and displayed child pornography is therefore legal, as it does not represent 'real children.'
That should come as great news to the international child pornography networks, given that the United States is their number-one market. According to investigative author Gordon Thomas, the majority of child pornography produced worldwide is targeted at the U.S., where by the early 1990s it was already a $3 billion a year business, and growing. Thomas claims that - according to law enforcement figures - over 22 million copies of child pornography videos were sold or rented in the U.S. in 1991. He also writes that much of that pornographic material is produced domestically, where it is "part of the largest segment of movie making in the United States." Jan Hollingsworth concurs with Thomas' figures, describing child pornography as a "three-billion-dollar - per year - U.S. industry that grossed twice that worldwide. It [is] bigger than Disney. Much bigger." Speaking of Disney, Thomas notes that child porn videos are frequently trafficked internationally by deceptively packaging them as Disney videos.
Strangely enough, the first man to benefit from the 9th Circuit Court decision was Patrick J. Naughton. You may remember him as the executive with the Walt Disney Co. who ran one of the company's kid-friendly web sites. Naughton was arrested and later tried on child pornography charges. He was convicted on December 16, just one day before the decision was handed down in the case before the circuit court. Within hours of the appeals court ruling, Naughton was released by federal prosecutors on $100,000 bail. Despite the fact that he was, as the Times acknowledged, convicted of "possessing pictures of actual children," a decision was made to release him "until the impact of the court's ruling can be sorted out" - illustrating the significant undermining of existing law that could result from the circuit court ruling.
On January 22, 2001, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear an appeal of the case. In April 2002, the high court rendered its decision, upholding the ruling of the lower court. By doing so, the highest court in the land extended the ban on prosecutions of "virtual-child pornography" to all fifty states. As the L.A. Times reported on April 17, 2002, the "ruling creates an immunity for a new generation of 'virtual' pornographers who rely entirely on computer images." The Times noted that it was "an unexpected move" for the conservative court, describing the decision as "a surprisingly strong defense of the right to free speech." The decision was, alas, not all that surprising, given that the Supreme Court has demonstrated in the past - most notably during the 2000 election debacle - its willingness to toss aside its alleged principles when the need arises. Noted by The Times once again was the concern among prosecutors that they will "have a hard time proving that children portrayed on an Internet sex site, for example, are real children." The decision handed down by the Supreme Court, notably, "does not answer that concern."
Closely associated with child pornography is, of necessity, child abuse. It should be self-evident that all kids used in child pornography are abused children, their abuse recorded on film and tape for the depraved enjoyment of other child abusers. As Anne Houston, the director of the organization Childline Scotland, has said: "Every image of child abuse on the internet is a crime scene."
Also closely associated with child pornography is the always-controversial issue of 'missing children.' There is considerable debate as to whether there is a problem in this country with missing children. Some claim that 200,000 or more children disappear without a trace every year. Others steadfastly maintain that numbers such as those are grossly inflated, and that abduction of children by strangers with bad intent is actually quite rare. The problem is that nobody really knows for sure, since the FBI - America's compiler of crime statistics - does not bother to keep track. As the Los Angeles Times reported in July 2002, there is a "lack of knowledge about the prevalence of a crime that historically has not been included in the federal government's Uniform Crime Report. Local agencies have only sporadically kept data." Many believe that the numbers are not compiled because the FBI does not want to know - or more accurately, the FBI does not want the American people to know, how many children disappear every year.
What is known though is that reports of child abuse have skyrocketed. Between 1963 and 1988, reported cases of child abuse rose from 150,000 to 2,000,000 per year, a 1300% increase in just a quarter-century. Child abuse may in fact be the most prevalent crime in American society - and possibly the most significant as well, given that it provides the breeding ground for so much of the more visible crime plaguing Western culture. As Thomas reports: "over 90 percent of the teenage prison population are now victims of child abuse." And that population is growing rapidly. In the wake of that rising tide, the Los Angeles Times reported in March 2001 that: "President Bush's budget will trim a program aimed at preventing child abuse and cut some child care spending . A child abuse prevention program will see an 18% cut."
Author and e-zine editor Robert Sterling has written of what he refers to as "a pattern of trivialization of child molestation evidence" that seems to characterize high-profile media stories. He points out, for instance, that in the highly publicized Woody Allen and Mia Farrow child custody case, all the attention was focused on Allen's illicit romance with Soon-yi Previn. Almost entirely ignored in the media coverage was the fact that Allen was also charged with molesting his own seven-year-old adopted daughter, Dylan. While the press dismissed those allegations as unfounded and unworthy of reporting, Sterling notes that, "Connecticut state authorities, based on the testimony of Dylan and others, have stated that they do believe Woody did molest her, but decided not to prosecute anyway," allegedly to spare the child any further trauma.
Sterling also takes note of the "case of the Menendez brothers, who, after admitting to murdering their parents, painfully revealed that they were ruthlessly abused and molested by them over the years." Their claims were never fully investigated and the boys were "viciously demonized for trying to escape the murder charges and accused of making up their abuse," though there was in fact evidence of that abuse. Also referenced by Sterling is the kid-gloves treatment afforded Michael Jackson when he was charged with molestation: "even though the accusations against him are widely believed to be true, [they] are merely passed off with a laugh among other smirking monologue jokes on Jay Leno." And of course, though not mentioned by Sterling, sister LaToya was ridiculed by the media when she came forward with stories about the sexual abuse suffered by the Jackson kids at the hands of their father. Other cases discussed in the Sterling piece include the over-hyped 'au-pair' trial, during which evidence of prior abuse of the child by his parents was consistently ignored, and the Susan Smith case, in which the media refused to consider whether Smith's own severe childhood abuse could have been a factor in the murder of her children, despite the fact that her father admitted to the chronic abuse.
Coupled with the fact that the press have consistently downplayed the occurrence of child molestation is the equally disturbing fact that that very same media have actively promoted the sexualization of children - a trend that has been greatly accelerated in recent years, and which has served to, to some degree, legitimize pedophilia. Taking note of the proliferation of young teen - and even pre-teen - sex symbols, Tom Junod wrote in Esquire (February 2001) that: "the entire culture is besotted with the erotic promise of teenage girls . The lure of jailbait now supplies the erotic energy to a popular culture desperate for what's new, what's young, what's alive." The Junod article is, strangely enough, a profile of Greg Dark, one-half of the former 'Dark Brothers' - notorious purveyors of dark-themed, occult-tinged porno films. Dark is rather noteworthy for having openly produced and peddled child pornography, in that many of his films featured a very young Traci Lords, who began working with the Dark Brothers at the age of thirteen.
But Dark has now put those days long behind him. He is now working comfortably in the mainstream. And he is no longer marketing teen sexuality. No, now he is creating music videos . for Britney Spears, Mandy Moore and the pre-teen Leslie Carter (sister of Aaron Carter and "Back Street Boy" Nick Carter). That is, according to Dark, a completely different line of work.
It is not just the media that has been actively promoting the sexualization of children; certain segments of academia have been busily doing so as well. On April 19, 2002, the Washington Times carried a report detailing a "movement within academia to promote 'free sexual expression of children.'" This "movement to legitimize sex between adults and children is 'gathering steam,' warns Stephanie Dallam, researcher for the Leadership Council for Mental Health, Justice and the Media in Philadelphia, an organization that deals with prevention and treatment of child abuse. 'Some people view children as the next sexual frontier,' Ms. Dallam says." Referenced in The Times article is Judith Levine's book Harmful to Minors: The Perils of Protecting Children from Sex, published by the University of Minnesota Press. Levine's book endorses a Dutch law passed in 1990 "that effectively lowered the age of consent to 12." As The Times article points out, the book "is only the most recent in a series of academic arguments for 'consensual' sex involving children." Included among such academic endeavors are:
Many of these recent arguments in favor of the expression of child sexuality were influenced by the work of Indiana University professor Alfred Kinsey, who claimed in his notorious late-1940s/early-1950s reports on human sexuality that children "are sexual from birth." The professor was, oddly enough, another devoted disciple of Aleister Crowley [an avowed Satanist and Freemason]. Kinsey died shortly after paying a visit to Crowley's Thelema Abbey in Sicily with filmmaker and fellow occultist Kenneth Anger - who was the roommate and probable lover of Manson Family member Bobby Beausoleil . but we will get to that later.
Like child molestation and child abduction, child prostitution is also closely associated with child pornography. And make no mistake about it; child prostitution is a booming business. A&E's "Investigative Reports" has noted that law enforcement figures indicate that there are currently some 600,000 child prostitutes working in the United States and Canada, in an industry that generates $5 billion a year worldwide. A&E also reported that, throughout North America, there is "growing use of children in the sex trade." Young boys make up 51% of that trade. The FBI, alas, has turned a blind eye; for the last quarter-century, "federal prosecutions of major pimp operations have been virtually nonexistent." As Dr. Lois Lee has noted, "It's not a high priority with the FBI to go after kids that are being transported across state lines. It's really a disgrace."
Dr. Lee is the founder of Children of the Night, an organization devoted to helping repair the shattered lives of child-sex-trade victims. Her facility, said to be the only one of its kind in the world, has seen 10,000 kids pass through its doors. Fully ninety percent of them have suffered a lifetime of abuse - first at home, and later on the streets and alleys of America's big cities. Most of them suffered their first abuse before the age of three. Many of these victims are runaways recruited from small towns across the country, and then brought to prime child prostitution markets like Los Angeles and Las Vegas. Once there, they have an average life span of just seven years; many of them do not make it through their teenage years. For as long as they survive though, they reap enormous financial rewards for their pimps. The younger the child, the more popular they are with the 'Johns,' and therefore the more profitable for their exploiters.
A landmark study on the commercial sexual exploitation of children was concluded by the University of Pennsylvania's School of Social Work in 2001. The chilling report issued by the researchers was completely ignored by the U.S. media. That no doubt was due in part to the rather curious timing of the release of the report: it was issued on September 10, 2001 - less than twenty-four hours before the World Trade Center towers came crashing down. Written by Richard J. Estes and Neil Alan Weiner, the study notes that the era of "economic globalization, internationalization, and free trade" has been accompanied by a "dramatic rise worldwide in the incidence of child exploitation . Child pornography, juvenile prostitution and trafficking in children for sexual purposes have emerged as significant problems on the national, regional, and international stages. So, too, has child sex tourism.3 The ugly reality is that, in the global marketplace, everything has a price tag - including the sexual services of our children. The study also revealed, "CSE [child sexual exploitation] and the CSEC [commercial sexual exploitation of children] appear to be related in complex ways with other forms of child exploitation, such as the use of children in labor, drug and warfare settings."
Among the findings summarized in the report's Executive Summary are all of the following:
Obvious in these findings is the fact that the trafficking of children - both nationally and internationally - is an immense, and immensely profitable, criminal enterprise4 requiring "the involvement of a wide range of functionaries - including recruiters, trainers, purveyors of false documents, transporters, money collectors, enforcers . arrangers/investors . corrupt public officials, informers, guides and crew members . supporting personnel and specialists." The University's researchers also discovered "approximately 10% of pimps in the U.S. are tied into international sex crime networks." These individuals "participate actively in the international trafficking of children--including American children and children who are nationals of other countries. Typically, these pimps also are connected in some way . to international drug networks." The close connections between the international trafficking of children and the international trafficking of drugs is significant in that, as a number of researchers have documented, America's Central Intelligence Agency plays a central role in the international drug trade. It would seem then to logically follow that that same organization would be deeply involved in the equally lucrative international trade in children.
Just months before the release of the University of Pennsylvania's report, DePaul University's International Human Rights Law Institute released the results of a three year study of sexual slavery. Researchers concluded that some two million women and children are held in sexual servitude worldwide - and those numbers are growing. As with the other academic study, the report's authors concluded that the "advent of globalization has exacerbated the problem by creating what some call market opportunities for traffickers in human beings and for their exploiters." Also as with the other study, researchers found clear evidence of official complicity in the trafficking rings. The report's authors warned that trafficking victims "have no one to turn to for help. Law enforcers are frequently in collusion with the traffickers and exploiters and victims who seek to escape are returned to their captors by those from whom they sought protection. Their despondency and despair is beyond description."
An estimated 30,000 of these victims die every year from "abuse, torture, neglect and disease." But neither the U.S. media nor the Washington establishment have anything to say about that, leaving the America people in a state of collective ignorance and denial even as child exploitation rings, which constitute a vast underground in this country, grow exponentially.
How far does this pedophilic underground extend into the halls of power? Are America's political, corporate and military elite - like their counterparts in Belgium, Latvia and Portugal - hiding a particularly dirty little secret from the American people? A secret that, if exposed, could shatter America's cherished political and economic institutions and bring the house of cards crashing down? Consider the case of Craig Spence, a behind-the-scenes Republican powerbroker in Washington. In June 1989, the Washington Times published a story that sent shockwaves rippling across Capitol Hill. It seemed that Spence had been deeply involved with a callboy ring that supplied young boys, some of them very young boys, to the elite of both political parties, as well as to visiting dignitaries.
It was reported by The Times that a list of some 200 influential clients included the names of "government officials, locally based U.S. military officers, businessmen, lawyers, bankers, congressional aides, media representatives and other professionals," only a few of whom were publicly identified. On the guest lists for Spence's parties were former CIA Director William Casey and former Deputy Director of Intelligence Ray Cline; Congressman Barney Frank and Senators John Glenn and Frank Murkowski; political activist/propagandist Phyllis Schlafly; former Attorney General John Mitchell (who once co-hosted a party with Spence); journalists William Safire, Liz Trotta, Ted Koppel and Eric Sevareid; former Ambassadors James Lilley, Robert Neumann and Elliot Richardson; General Alfred M. Gray, the Commandant of the U.S. Marine Corps, and Lt. General Daniel O. Graham, an expert on the 'Space Defense Initiative'; and former U.S. Attorneys Joseph diGenova and Victoria Toensing. Spence once held a birthday bash for the notorious Roy Cohn. He also boasted of playing host to Rock Hudson and other celebrities.
Among the revelations in the case was that Spence had taken some of his callboy escorts on private, late-night tours of the White House. The tours, of which there were at least four, were cleared by a uniformed Secret Service guard who moonlighted as a bodyguard at Spence's parties. Spence hinted that the tours were arranged by the national security adviser to then-Vice President George H.W. Bush, Donald Gregg, for whom Spence once sponsored a dinner. One of the tours occurred just after Spence stopped by the Nightline studio to see his friend, Ted Koppel. Spence reportedly introduced Koppel to a 15-year-old boy, whom Koppel later claimed Spence had introduced as his son. Koppel though had been a close friend for over twenty years and surely knew that Spence did not have a teenage son. Koppel first met Spence in Southeast Asia when Koppel was serving as the ABC bureau chief in Hong Kong, and Spence was nominally working as an ABC correspondent in Vietnam.
Spence openly boasted of working with both the CIA and ranking members of the Reagan and Bush administrations. He claimed that he had been involved in covert operations in Vietnam, Japan, Central America and the Middle East. His claims were scoffed at and he was largely portrayed as a self-important blowhard. There are indications, however, that Spence was involved in covert operations as far back as Vietnam, where he could well have been working under journalistic cover. An associate of his from that era told the Washington Post: "Spence pulled disappearing acts in Vietnam -- sometimes for weeks at a time . Then he'd turn up, refusing to say where he'd been."
"The sex? That's done all the time," a former Bush economic adviser told the press. "If a foreign diplomat wants a companion, the State Department provides it. It doesn't matter if it's a man or woman. They have a special fund set up for that." What the unnamed adviser did not say was that such services were provided not as a courtesy to the dignitary, but as a way to compromise and control. Allegations quietly arose that the callboy ring, and Spence's parties, were part of a CIA sexual blackmail operation. Spence's Washington mansion was said to be overflowing with surveillance equipment, including hidden cameras and microphones and an abundance of two-way mirrors. It was also alleged that cocaine flowed freely at Spence's parties, and that he could have been involved in bringing drugs in from El Salvador.
The Spence story never really registered on the national media's radar screen. Despite being a largely Republican scandal, it was completely ignored by such pillars of the purportedly liberal press as the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times. The story soon disappeared entirely and Washington and the media proceeded to pretend as though nothing had ever happened. According to a Washington Times reporter, the paper trail was quickly covered up. Some 20,000 documents pertaining to the case were sealed by court order and the U.S. Attorney's office issued a gag order on the release of information. By the time that Craig Spence turned up dead in a Boston hotel less than five months after the story first broke, he had been all but forgotten. He had earlier told a friend: "I may be disappearing soon. It will be sudden. It may appear to be a suicide, but it won't be."
Spence was reportedly found lying on his bed in room 429 of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel, wearing a tuxedo and with a telephone cradled to his ear and a Walkman headset around his neck. He had, according to the Independent, "no obvious signs of injury," and "police refused to comment on the cause of death." The door to the room was barricaded. Written on the mirror were several messages, one of which read: "Chief, consider this my resignation, effective immediately. As you always said, you can't ask others to make a sacrifice if you are not ready to do the same. Life is duty. God bless America." Another was an apology to the hotel: "To the Ritz, please forgive this inconvenience." A third was an unexplained Japanese phrase: "Nisei Bei." The hotel registry showed that the room the apparent suicide victim was found in was occupied by "C.S. Kane."
Spence had been subpoenaed by a grand jury but had not yet been called to appear. As it turned out, very few witnesses ever did appear before that grand jury. Spence had also reportedly agreed to provide Penthouse magazine with "lurid details of Washington's bisexual wonderland." His story, needless to say, was never told.
The callboy ring, oddly enough, had close ties to the funeral home/mortuary business. Robert Chambers was convicted on charges of handling the credit card processing for Professional Services, Inc., an entity that served as a cover for an interlinked network of half-a-dozen male escort services. Chambers was a funeral director and the son of the owner of the Chambers Funeral Homes chain. He was sentenced to serve 41 months. Two of the linked services, Dream Boys and Man to Man, were reportedly run by Henry Vinson, a mortician and the former coroner of Mingo County, West Virginia. Vinson had moved to D.C. after losing his job as coroner for making harassing phone calls to rival funeral homes. While he was under investigation in Washington, his obituary appeared in West Virginia newspapers, apparently as the result of an assisted effort to fake his death. Vinson6 ultimately pled guilty and received a 63-month sentence. The presiding judge openly criticized U.S. Attorney Jay Stephens for departing from mandatory sentencing guidelines. Vinson's legal representation was provided by Fox News mouthpiece Greta Van Susteren.
Also implicated in the case was Democratic Congressman Barney Frank, whose D.C. home was used as a base of operations for an escort service from late 1985 through mid 1987. The service was run by Frank's lover, Stephen L. Gobie, the son of a Marine Corps master sergeant and Pentagon budget analyst. Frank wrote a number of letters to probation officials on behalf of Gobie, who had four felony convictions from 1982. Those letters provided the necessary cover for the ring, which Frank denied having knowledge of. Gobie also regularly operated out of Chevy Chase Elementary School, in collusion with the 'magnet' school's principal, Gabriel A. Massaro, a former school counselor. The school was home to 350 students aged nine to twelve. Massaro vigorously denied that any students were involved in callboy operations, which he eventually admitted were run from the school. In addition to Barney Frank and Gabriel Massaro, Stephen Gobie had close ties to Craig Spence as well.
Elsewhere in the country, a political operative named Larry King - hailed as "the fastest rising Black star in the Republican Party" - was embroiled in another high-level pedophile ring. King, whose operation was based in Omaha, Nebraska, had connections to Craig Spence as well as to Ronald Reagan, George Bush, Oliver North, and various other major players in Washington. The King story first began to emerge with the collapse of his Franklin Community Credit Union, one of many such entities that went belly-up in the 1980s savings and loan scandals. A special senate 'Franklin Committee' was established and tasked with looking into allegations of financial improprieties, but soon found itself instead investigating claims of child prostitution, child pornography and ritual homicide. Committee members began receiving anonymous threats.
The investigation led to the doorsteps of some of the most powerful men in Omaha, including newspaper publisher Harold Andersen (a lunch partner of George Bush), local columnist Peter Citron, a judge, the mayor, the city's Games and Parks Commissioner, a prominent attorney, the former police chief, businessman Alan Baer, and multi-billionaire Warren Buffet (for whose son King sponsored a political fund-raiser). Some of the victim/witnesses identified George Bush as being directly complicit. The scandal was completely ignored by the national U.S. media, and appears to have been covered by the local press for the sole purpose of discrediting the witnesses and denouncing the investigation as yet another 'witch hunt.' The case did attract some attention from the European press though. Pronto, Spain's largest circulation weekly, reported that the scandal "appears to directly implicate politicos of the state of Nebraska and Washington, D.C. who are very close to the White House and George Bush." The report also noted "there is reason to believe that the CIA is directly implicated," and the "FBI refuses to help in the investigation and has sabotaged any efforts" by others to do so.
A documentary film crew from the UK's Yorkshire Television, working in conjunction with the Discovery Channel, worked for months investigating the case. The result of their efforts was a film entitled "Conspiracy of Silence," which concluded that the child victims/witnesses were telling the truth. The documentary was scheduled to air on the Discovery Channel on May 3, 1994. Just days before the scheduled airing, the film was pulled without explanation and all copies were ordered destroyed. At least one production copy of the video survived the purge, however, and has been known to circulate among those derisively labeled as 'conspiracy theorists.' For everyone else, the conspiracy of silence continues.
The Omaha operation, described in the film as a "large ring of rich and powerful pedophiles," appears to have been in business for several years - with the knowledge of, and for the perverse pleasure of, a variety of city, state and federal authorities. Jerry Lowe, the first investigator assigned to the case by the Franklin Committee, reported back: "The allegations regarding the exploitation of children are indeed disturbing. What appears to be documented cases of child abuse and sexual abuse dating back several years with no enforcement action being taken by the appropriate agencies is on its face, mind-boggling." The investigation revealed that many of the child victims had been recruited from one of America's most revered charitable organizations - Boy's Town, with which King had maintained close ties since 1979. Senator and committee member Loran Schmit has said that Boy's Town was mentioned frequently during the investigation, "but we found it difficult to get information about Boy's Town." So too did the film crew from Yorkshire Television.
Republican state senator and Franklin Committee member John DeCamp, in his book The Franklin Cover-Up, presents a compelling body of evidence to document the charges made by the child victims and various others associated with the operation. Equally disturbing is the evidence presented of the massive cover-up that was perpetrated by the FBI, local police, a grand jury assigned to the case, and of course the ever-compliant media. The cover-up involved, according to DeCamp, the untimely deaths of at least fifteen key players in the scandal - including Franklin Committee investigator Gary Caradori, whose private plane was blown out of the sky on July 11, 1990 with Caradori and his eight-year-old son on board. Caradori had been threatened frequently, as had the witnesses from whom he was gathering information. His vehicle had also been repeatedly tampered with. His brother claimed that Gary had told him that he had recently come to possess a key piece of evidence (a book of addresses and phone numbers) that was so damaging, "if they knew he had it, they'd kill him."
The wreckage of Caradori's plane, as a reporter on the scene noted, was "strewn over a ¾ to 1 mile stretch." A National Transportation Safety Board investigator acknowledged that the "fact that the wreckage is scattered over a large area certainly demonstrates that it did break up in flight." Family members claimed that there were items missing from the plane's wreckage, most significantly Caradori's briefcase. Within twenty-four hours of the crash, all of his records had been impounded by the FBI. Nevertheless, the NTSB ruled that the crash had been accidental, with no evidence of sabotage. The Franklin Committee - led by Senator Schmit, who suspected sabotage - ordered a private investigation into the cause of the crash. Strangely enough, the man selected to conduct that inquiry was William Colby, a fifty-year veteran of intelligence operations whose career began in the OSS during World War II. Colby's hiring was urged by his protégé, Senator DeCamp.
In the 1950s, Colby served as the CIA station chief in Italy, overseeing the notorious Operation Gladio. In the 1960s, he ran the Phoenix Program, a campaign of assassination, torture and terror that claimed, by Colby's own account, some 20,000 Vietnamese lives. The program was steeped in mind control operations, including the use of prisoners-of-war as unwilling participants in terminal experiments. One of Colby's top aides in Vietnam was none other than John DeCamp. After Vietnam, Colby served as the director of the CIA under President Nixon (Nixon's appointed successor, Gerald Ford, replaced him with George Bush). Considering his past history, Colby was certainly an odd choice to lead an inquiry aimed at ascertaining the truth. Colby's conclusion, according to the Omaha World Herald, was that although "the crash had some strange aspects, there was no specific evidence of sabotage."
Just as appalling as the trail of dead witnesses was the fact that the child victims, rather than the perpetrators, were arrested and thrown in prison. One of them, a young female victim, achieved the rather dubious honor of spending more time in solitary confinement than any other woman in the history of the Nebraska penal system. She was sentenced to 9-25 years in prison for allegedly committing perjury. Her sentence was ten years longer than the one Larry King received for looting his financial institution of $40 million. DeCamp explained to the "Conspiracy of Silence" film crew that a message was being sent "to every kid who is a potential witness." Senator Schmit, who told the filmmakers that his pursuit of the investigation had cost him his career and his financial security, believed that a clear signal was being sent to Nebraska politicians as well: a signal to not pursue the investigation any further.
A visibly shaken and disillusioned Schmit explained to the film crew that he "used to be a firm believer that the system would work and that people who did things wrong would be punished. And we discovered victims who claimed to have been abused, and who the grand jury acknowledged had been abused, but they did not try to find out who had abused these individuals. Instead, they convicted Alisha Owen of perjury . indefensible from my point of view." It was a full decade before any of the victims received even a semblance of justice, and that came not from the criminal justice system, but from a civil court. In early 1999, a judgment was entered against defendant Larry King in favor of plaintiff Paul Bonacci, who was one of the most severely abused of the child victims. His abuse at the hands of King began when he was just six years old and included his forced collaboration in the production of child snuff films. The memorandum of the district court's decision, issued on February 22, 1999, reads as follows:
Between December 1980 and 1988, the complaint alleges, the defendant King continually subjected the plaintiff to repeated sexual assaults, false imprisonments, infliction of extreme emotional distress, organized and directed satanic rituals, forced the plaintiff to 'scavenge' for children to be a part of the defendant King's sexual abuse and pornography ring, forced the plaintiff to engage in numerous sexual contacts with the defendant King and others and participate in deviate sexual games and masochistic orgies with other minor children. The defendant King's default has made those allegations true as to him...
The now uncontradicted evidence is that the plaintiff has suffered much. He has suffered burns, broken fingers, beatings of the head and face and other indignities by the wrongful actions of the defendant King. In addition to the misery of going through the experiences just related over a period of eight years, the plaintiff has suffered the lingering results to the present time. He is a victim of multiple personality disorder, involving as many as fourteen distinct personalities aside from his primary personality. He has given up a desired military career and received threats on his life. He suffers from sleeplessness, has bad dreams, has difficulty in holding a job, is fearful that others are following him, fears getting killed, has depressing flashbacks, and is verbally violent on occasion, all in connection with the multiple personality disorder and caused by the wrongful activities of the defendant King.
For the years of unspeakable abuse he suffered, Bonacci was awarded one million dollars. While a bittersweet victory at best, it was considerably more than most other victims of such abuse have gotten. The man primarily responsible for inflicting that abuse, Larry King, has been released from prison and is a free man at the time of this writing.
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