Chapo Trap House - 628 - Real Detective feat. Nick Bryant (5/16/22)

Episode Date: May 17, 2022

In a more serious episode, we talk to author and journalist Nick Bryant about his 2009 book “The Franklin Scandal: A Story of Powerbrokers, Child Abuse & Betrayal.” We’ve mentioned the Franklin Credit Union scandal in passing on the show before, but it begins with the collapse of the Franklin Credit Union in Omaha, Nebraska in 1988 due to rampant corruption and embezzlement of its manager, Lawrence E. King, Jr. Soon after, King was accused, along with GOP lobbyist Craig Spence, of orchestrating a massive child prostitution ring, shuttling minors between Omaha and D.C., and using their solicitation to blackmail high ranking political figures. Bryant’s work examines the evidence behind this, and we discuss the scandal, the victims, the cover up, intelligence agency connections of its perpetrators, and the crucial links between intelligence-led sexual political blackmail operations of the past with the Epstein case today. Follow Nick on Twitter here: @nick__bryant Find more info, Nick’s book and Nick’s blog on his website here: nickbryantnyc.com

Hello, it's Chapo for Monday, May 16th. And let's just get into it with this week's guest. We are joined by Nick Bryant, author of The Franklin Scandal. Now close listeners of the show will probably be familiar with maybe some like a few veiled references to The Franklin Credit Scandal that we've made reference to in the past on this show. But today we're doing a deep dive into the history of this. And I'll start here.

Nick, for someone who's not aware of it, if they come across something called The Franklin Credit Scandal, it sounds pretty dry and pretty boring. But it really doesn't give, just doesn't do justice to how truly nightmarish and terrifying this scandal and what your book is about. So I guess like in the broadest strokes for someone who is not aware or hasn't heard of The Franklin Credit Scandal or Larry King or Craig Spence or any of the truly nightmarish details of this story, what are the, what are the broad outlines? Like if you had to describe to someone who never heard it before, what The Franklin Credit

Scandal is. Do you want a light rendition with maybe put on some light, happy music or? No, give us the raw shit. The Franklin Scandal, my book is entitled The Franklin Scandal, a story of Power Broker's Child Abuse and Betrayal, and it's about a, there was an innocuous sounding Franklin Federal Credit Union in Omaha, Nebraska, not affiliated with Ben Franklin, not affiliated with Franklin Stoves, but nonetheless called The Franklin Credit Union. And it was a front for a nationwide pedophile network.

Its manager was Lawrence E. King of Omaha, Nebraska. And he had a fellow pimp in Washington DC called Craig Spence. They ran this nationwide pedophile network. And at Craig Spence's home, which was in a very opulent part of Washington DC, Craig Spence was a CIA asset. And his home was, had a bunch of little cameras all over it. And it was wired for audiovisual blackmail. And King would fly kids in to Washington DC quite a bit.

I've got a number of their flight receipts. And the parties would go down at Craig Spence's. And if politicians put themselves in a, or any kind of power broker put themselves in a compromising position, they would in fact be blackmail. And what happened with the credit union is Lawrence E. King used the credit union as his personal ATM, and he was inexplicably able to stave off audits for about four years because a federally funded, or federally insured credit union should be audited every year, but he was able to stave off.

And then all of a sudden the FBI came in and he was $40 million short. So the Nebraska Senate formed a subcommittee to look into the money because they saw that there hadn't been any oversight to the Franklin Credit Union. Well, over four years, but when the Franklin Committee formed, a number of social service personnel came to the, came to the senators and said, there's a pedophile network. King is running a pedophile network. And the social services personnel had gone to state and federal law, law enforcement, and they were just ignored, completely ignored.

And in my book, I show how disingenuous state and federal law enforcement is. And this network was big. I mean, Epstein's network was around for 25, 26 years, most likely. This network was around for about 12, but I think it was much, much bigger than Epstein's. Epstein required one grandeur to cover it up, and this network required three grandeuries. And I don't know if your listeners are familiar with how a grandeur works, but it's a very important part of this story. When people think of grand jury, they think that the gods of jurisprudence have spoken,

but that's not the case. In a grand jury, grand jurors are just people that have shown up for jury duty, and they've been funneled into a grand jury. And there's nothing special about them. They've just been funneled into a grand jury. And a special prosecutor has chosen, and he shows the grand jurors the evidence that he deems is important. And there isn't anything adversarial.

So he can take the grand jurors wherever he wants to take them by showing them evidence, by calling witnesses. And this particular grand jury was very, very, well, all the grand jurors to cover up the Franklin network were very, very corrupt. There was an esteemed New York judge said that special prosecutors of a grand jury have so much power over grand jurors that they could get them to indict a ham sandwich. So in this case, in Nebraska, these two grand juries, one state, one federal, they didn't indict a single perp.

And there were a lot of perps, but they indicted two kids that refused to recant their abuse. And one was Paul Benassi and one was Alicia, and Paul was looking at 60 years from the state grand jury, and Alicia was looking at 160 years from the state grand jury and 40 years from the federal grand jury for her grand dad. And so Alicia was looking at 200 years in prison. And she was indicted when she was 21, and she refused to recant. And a kangaroo court sentenced her to between nine and 15 years. Now it was very important that Alicia only be found guilty because they needed to sanctify

the grand jury that said that the child abuse allegations were a quote unquote, carefully crafted hoax. But they didn't say who carefully crafted the hoax. So it was a bunch of young, drug-addled kids who had been repeatedly molested. I mean, they weren't carefully crafting anything. So Alicia, all the dirty tricks that can be used in a court of law were used in Alicia's case, and she was found guilty. And now here's a kid, you know, I mean, and she was trafficked as an adolescent.

She was found guilty and sentenced between nine and 15 years in prison for perjury. And actually, her perjury case was the longest criminal case in Nebraska history. And the authorities really tried to destroy her. They put her in solitary for two years. And I've got a podcast, I've just started a podcast, and I told you. And Alicia is the first person that I interviewed on my podcast. I mean, yeah, you describe this as a universe that encompasses the refined industrial destruction of children and its cover-up.

You mentioned the Jeffrey Epstein network. And you know, reading your book, the similarities between what Lawrence King and Franklin Credit were doing and their connections to Washington, D.C., one can't help but notice the staggering similarities between both the men involved in it and the nature of their crimes. And I'm like, you know, secondary to the like unspeakable abuse of children that's going on here. Like the thread that unites them is some staggering connections to the intelligence community in the United States.

Could you talk about Lawrence King, the guy who was like, you know, the main like, you know, pimp and, you know, it's human trafficker involved in this. Can you talk about his connections to William Colby, the former, sorry, William Casey, the former CIA director? Well, King and Casey, Lawrence King and Casey were very good friends. Here's my hypothesis, because the two primary pimps, as I said, were Lawrence King and Craig Spence. They were both in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War.

King was in Thailand, and he had a top security clearance. And Spence was in Vietnam covering the war for ABC. And both were inveterate hardcore pedophiles, unrepentant pedophiles. And my surmise on how they came together is that they were probably, both of them were probably busted molesting kids in Southeast Asia. And at some point, they had an excess with intelligence, because Craig Spence was definitely a CIA asset. And I wrote a second book about this called Confessions of a DC Madame, the Politics of

Sex Lies and Blackmail. And I get into the CIA connections a little bit closer, the intelligence connections. So very much like Epstein, the Franklin network was definitely an outlet for intelligence to compromise people. And here's the thing. These U.S. attorneys, and both the Franklin Credit Union scandal and the Epstein scandal, these U.S. attorneys were told to stand down. And there's only two people that have the power in the United States to tell the U.S.

attorney to stand down. That is the attorney general and the president of the United States. So that's the kind of power that was deployed to cover up not only the Franklin network, but also the Epstein network. And then you also described Craig Spence's house being wired for video and sound as just a huge blackmail network where it was not just about catering to the evil predilections of powerful men, but it's also about controlling powerful men. And you described this as kind of an invisible system of the real system of checks and balances

in our government about who gets to do what and who has what on whom. Yes, actually, I just wrote a blog this morning called Sexual Political Blackmail, a time-honored tradition in America. And Americans have a very collective naivete about sexual political blackmail. It's disheartening, but it's so absurd, this naivete. I'll give you an example of a sexual political blackmail that's never come out, or that's recently come out, is there was a muckraking journalist who found out that Alexander Hamilton had a 23-year-old mistress who was married, and her husband was shaking Alexander Hamilton

down. So this muckraker outed Hamilton, and Hamilton and Jefferson had a lot of ant-hypathy. And this muckraker thought that since he had outed Hamilton's little blackmail and his prolection for this much younger married woman, that Jefferson would certainly give him a political appointment when Jefferson became president. But Jefferson did not, and he nonetheless tried to blackmail Jefferson, and then he outed Jefferson for having sex with one of his slaves, Sally Hemmings. So sexual political blackmail has been going on forever and ever, and I can give you two

examples of guys that were obviously blackmailed. One is Larry Craig. He was a really far-right-wing guy from Idaho, and he was in Washington, D.C. for 25 years. He was there as a representative, and then he was there as a U.S. senator. Now this guy had a runaway, libido, as I said earlier, I wrote a book called Confessions of a D.C. Madam, and Craig was getting male prostitutes from Henry Vincent, who ran this escort service, and then there was a film called Outrage made by Kirby Dick, where it showed that Craig

was getting escorts from other services, too, and then Craig was trying to pick up a vice police officer in a bathroom at a Minneapolis airport. Here's an esteemed senator trying to pick up a vice squad cop in an airport, and it's kind of funny. I was in Minneapolis, and I go home probably once or twice, well, once every year or so. I guess the guy was slapping his foot, and that's kind of a signal for- The Wide Stance. It was the same as Wide Stance.

I was sitting on the throne, and some guy was slapping his foot on the ground, and I really felt bad for him. I thought he had a neurological disorder, so I obviously didn't understand the nuances of that kind of interaction, but Larry Craig certainly did. Now, how could Larry Craig not be compromised? How could he not be compromised? And then to add insult to injury, for us, he had the worst voting record for gay rights, I believe, in the Senate at the time.

And then there's Dennis Hastert, our former speaker of the House. Now, constitutionally, Dennis Hastert was the third most powerful man in the country, if the president goes and the vice president goes, the speaker of the House takes over. So Dennis Hastert had a history of molesting boys. He had a 40-year history of molesting boys. And there was a FBI whistleblower named Sabelle Edmonds, who came across some intelligence on Hastert going to House of Irreput in Chicago, while he was speaker of the House. So the FBI knew what he was up to while he was speaker of the House.

So how could he not be compromised? And it's very interesting when you start digging into this type of stuff. I have, it might be kind of a general question and kind of an impossible one to answer, because you really have to get inside the heads of very disparate types of people. But I'm from Chicago, and everyone in Cook County at least always hated Dennis Hastert. I think most people ended up agreeing, but the allegations against him, from the time he was a wrestling coach to up until he was speaker really, surprised me. Because I don't think anyone in Illinois who didn't know would have paged him as doing

that. It seemed true to the type of guy he was, but it turned out to be who he was. But do you think that there is, like, this is kind of a chicken and egg problem, right? Like do you think that these guys are, most of the time, like legitimately pedophiles, like they're legitimately into this? Or do you think it's like an exercise power, like that they're not so much like sexually interested in it, but they're like, okay, I think I'm above everyone in all these ways. What else can I get away with?

I can answer that question to a certain degree. When I was getting into this, when I was working on the Franklin scandal, I got to a blackmail photographer for that network. And I said to him, how does this work? He says, it's like you're on a yacht, and it's a beautiful day. And you can have whatever you want on this yacht, whatever you want. But if you decide to get off the yacht, the people on the yacht are going to make sure that you drown.

So what he meant by that is that if you're on the yacht, if you're compromised, I mean, I know of examples of compromised politicians being compromised helped their career exponentially. So that's one thing. I think that to run with today's political system, one almost has to be somewhat pathological. I'm not saying that politicians are pathological, but then you add this potent psychological alchemy of lust and power and arrogance. And nothing makes people stupid like lust, power, and arrogance. Nothing.

I mean, if you want to see a really smart guy get really stupid, put a beautiful young woman in front of him, and then you could just watch it unfold. So I think that some of these guys, Dennis Hastert obviously had been a pedophile for quite some time. And I think that his pedophilia helped his political career. Like I said, I see that happening with other people because I had to try to get my mind around that too. I didn't understand it.

And I talked to a psychologist in Washington, D.C. who works with some of these guys. Most of these guys are completely cool with molesting children, but some of them actually have the pangs of conscience. And she said sometimes it's a forbidden fruit syndrome too, where you've got guys that can eat steak whenever they want. So they ultimately end up going for forbidden fruit. So I hope that that kind of answers your question. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, I think it's like kind of like an impossible to answer question because you really, you have to do this impossible task of getting inside someone's head and you have to do it with like, you know, hundreds if not thousands of people. Just a little bit about how you got sort of interested and like involved in investigating this like, you know, really at this, this odyssey of evil and corruption. I mean, the book like the entry point to it is when you were sort of entreated by a like an editor or publisher or sort of looking into like, you know, like like satanic cults

and things like that. And you became across this group called The Finders. Can you talk about The Finders and like how that was like your sort of entry point into Franklin Credit? Okay. So here's what happened. And I was speaking to a Rolling Stone editor one day and he said, pitch me dark stories. And you know, I just kind of reflexively threw my hands up in the air and said, Nazi Satanist,

my next step was going to be where was the vampires? I didn't know where he was coming from. And then there was that little glint you can see him in editor's eyes occasionally. And he goes, Satanists, write me an article on Satanists. So I ended up interacting with various Satanists from various satanic sects. And while you're researching a subject, at least for me, I like to do a lot of deep research to see if there's anything that's interesting that I could have missed if I didn't go deep on it.

And I ultimately came across a US Customs Report on a cult called The Finders. And two of The Finders were dressed very nicely and they had six kids with them in Tallahassee, Florida. And a concerned citizen called the police and said that there might be child abuse going on. And the kids were like feral. They were only allowed to eat as a reward. They were outside.

And there's a woman named Elizabeth Voss who has written a nice three-part series on The Finders because a lot of documentation about The Finders was just released last year. It tried to cover it up. And she did a nice job of looking between the lines. And with The Finders, the US Customs got involved because the US Customs has a branch that's anti-child pornography. And they executed a search warrant on The Finders' warehouse and they came across pretty mind-boggling stuff.

I mean, they came across pictures of nude kids, quote, unquote, appearing to accent the child's genitals. They came across kids disbowing a goat. They came across a telex, said that two kids were going to be purchased in Hong Kong. And that someone in the embassy would facilitate the purchasing of two kids. And there was all these different ways to get kids. And there was something truly nefarious about all this. And then on the last page of this US Customs report, Ramon Martinez, the US Customs officer,

reports to the Washington DC police who helped execute the warrant. And the police officer was only willing to speak to him with anonymity. And he said that the CIA has taken this investigation over and there will be no more investigation on The Finders. And then The Finders were led out of jail and all their child abuse charges were dropped. And then all of a sudden, in the Washington Post, we read about The Finders being a cult of peace, love, and brown rice. And I read that.

And I kind of thought I knew how did the world work at that point. I mean, I knew that the CIA was involved in Guatemala and Chile and Iran. I mean, whenever the interests of multinational corporations were jeopardized because of a socialist or semi-socialist president or dictator taking over that particular country, I mean, I knew that the CIA acted. And I was aware of some other stuff, but that really, that was it. I said, what have I missed in life that the CIA is covering up for a bunch of nefarious people that are abusing children?

I mean, what have I missed? So that was the thing that started my honesty. And I tried to get as much information on The Finders as I possibly could, but nobody was really talking about The Finders. The Washington Post had interviewed the psychologist about The Finders, and he offered these deep anthropological insights into The Finders as if he was, you know, tracking some strange animal on the plains of the Serengeti. So I got his number and I called him up, and I said, my name is Nick Bryant.

I'm a writer. I'm researching The Finders. And this guy said, no, no, no, no, no, no, no comment. And so obviously, something had happened to him between the time that I talked to him and between the time he talked to The Washington Post. And everybody was shut down. Ramon Martinez wouldn't talk about it. I could not get any kind of documentation.

Years later, I would get the Tallahassee police report where a doctor said that two of the kids had been sexually abused. But then I heard about Franklin, about that network possibly having ties to the CIA. And that's what led me to Omaha, Nebraska. Okay. So like, in Omaha, Nebraska, Franklin Credit, this guy, Lawrence King, talk about like, who is this guy? Where did he come from?

And like, how did he rise to the heights of power and running this unspeakable criminal network of, like I said, yeah, evil and child abuse? Well, that's the thing. I commented on it a little bit earlier. Lawrence King was born into a very blue collar family. His father worked at one of the slaughterhouses in Omaha. And he grew up seemingly a normal person, but he had a top security clearance and he was sent to, and there isn't really, prior to that, there's nothing that really sticks

out as major malfeasance, criminality, or pedophilia. Now I could have missed something on him. That's entirely possible. But when he comes back from Southeast Asia, and the same thing was spent, when both of them come back from Southeast Asia, their careers start to skyrocket. With the Franklin Credit Union, King got Warren Buffett's wife kick in, I think 1.5 million, but don't quote me on the money. So although Warren Buffett would disavow that any kind of relationship, his wife did in

fact give the Franklin Credit Union money. So because, and this is what I believe, and I've been at this for about 20 years, King was a pedophile, just a straight up pedophile. And I think that started to work for this very shadowy malignant intelligence network that trafficked children and blackmailed politicians. The same is true with Epstein. Epstein came from a blue collar background in Coney Island, he was a college dropout. But at some point, his career just kind of skyrocketed too.

And I think that both can be traced to their pandering of children for intelligence. Yeah, I mean, the similarities between King and Epstein are quite stark. And I'm thinking about a quote in your book, I believe when like talking to one of the victims, a guy, Rogers, I believe, he conveyed to his sister and brother-in-law a rather mind-boggling account of that power. Power brokers had the code juice to completely erase people's backgrounds and insert them into high-ranking political positions. And that immediately made me think of Epstein, a guy who, you know, a high school graduate

who out of nowhere becomes a math professor at one of New York City's most prestigious private schools, and then is given, you know, put in charge of managing an astonishing amount of money in a private wealth fund because he's supposedly a math genius. But yeah, there's just these huge gaps and questions that have to be asked about who are, like, who are these seemingly, like, seeming nobodies who are suddenly inserted into positions of such prominence and power? Well, I think that nobodies are chosen for a particular reason because you can get rid of them.

They're disposable to their masters in intelligence. If you had someone who is from a famous family, a family of power, there could be some blowback. But with someone like King or Spence, Spence was also from a blue-collar family, too. Someone like King, Spence, or Epstein from a blue-collar family, there's not going to be any blowback if they turn up dead, which Spence and Epstein both turned up dead, apparent suicides. And then King kept his mouth shut, and he was put in a psychiatric institution, first in Springfield, Missouri, and then ultimately in Rochester, Minnesota, where he had to do

time, he had to do 10 years for his financial crimes. There wasn't any child abuse indictments against him whatsoever. So he did 10 years, and then he had a no-show job at a BMW dealership in Virginia when he got out. With King and Epstein, and I know a little bit more about Epstein's, like, pre-Black Malverang days just because of the extent of the coverage on it and how it's, like, a little more recent. But I mean, the weird thing with Epstein is how early it started, right?

I mean, he was a college dropout who was pretty early on. There was some weird shit going on because William Barr's father allowed him to be a math teacher at, yeah, one of Manhattan's most prestigious private schools. And so probably pretty early on, he was spotted, if not, like, institutionally by an individual who had similar, like, fucked up proclivities. But I thought it was interesting what you said about someone with a blue collar background can be discarded more easily. Do you think there are, like, I mean, again, this is another thing that would be really

hard to determine. But do you think there are instances where, you know, they start someone out on this path or, like, maybe not fully elucidating it, but, you know, they give someone a leg up. Like they did Epstein with his math job and then his Bear Stearns job or King with his credit union. And then, you know, it doesn't work out for whatever reason. And then they just, yeah, discard them before the world ever knows their name. My surmise on that is they get busted molesting a kid.

And then at that point, someone in intelligence can see that they have talents. And then take those talents and the pedophilia and then point it in a direction that can be used by intelligence. That's my end. I've been at this, I've been in this, you know, this underworld for 20 years. And that's what I believe goes on is that some people get busted. And the thing about it is the CIA has had, and we know about this operation midnight climax, has had safe houses in both New York and also in San Francisco with hidden cameras

where people would be blackmailed. They would go there. It was like a, it was ostensibly a brothel. And people would go there and the CIA, people would drug them and do other things to them. And then most of these guys had no recourse because they were married and they didn't want to blow their lives up. So the CIA with hidden cameras and blackmailing people, it's been around for a very, very long time.

Like I said, early on, sexual political blackmail in the United States rose back as far as the United States. And what's kind of interesting about this, I mean, J. Edgar Hoover was a blackmailer par excellence and he was probably being blackmailed too. So he accumulated all that power because you can destroy someone's life. A politician has zero incentive to come forward and say, I molested a kid and I'm being blackmailed. Zero incentive because that would completely decimate his life, decimate his family. He would live ignominiously for the rest of his life.

So these politicians and power brokers are pretty safe marks to blackmail. And the one thing that people miss about all this is that, like, Craig Spence was much more of a blackmail artist than King. I mean, King set it all up and King did his share of blackmail, but a lot of it was done at Craig Spence's home in Washington, D.C. Now Epstein had hidden cameras in his house in Florida, he had hidden cameras in his house in New York, he had hidden cameras on his island. And if you look at the people in the blackbook, I managed to get a copy of the blackbook and

I put it up on the internet in 2015. If you look at the powerful men in the book, and then the same thing with Spence, like Leslie Wexner, Jeffrey Epstein was pandering kids to Leslie Wexner. Now I wrote an article, if you want to really deep dive into this, you can read my article it's published by The Sheer Post, you can type in Sheer Post, Nick Bryan, Epstein. I show that Leslie Wexner has big time ties to organized crime. The person that does most of the trucking for him is an appendage of the Genovese crime family.

One of the attorneys that worked for Wexner was Shied Execution Style, who bullets in the back of the head with the 22, like how the mob and the CIA like to do it. So Wexner has this history of mafia, of being part of the mafia, or being tangentially part of the mafia. And if Epstein didn't have an intelligence, a large intelligence organization behind him, Leslie Wexner is just going to call up his friends in the Genovese crime family and say, stop this dude, because Jeffrey Epstein, and for that matter Craig Spence had a very powerful entities behind them, these intelligence entities, that went to these perpetrators and said,

you are compromised and that's just the way it is, and don't try to hurt Jeffrey Epstein or don't try to hurt Craig Spence because this will come back to haunt you. And these people have to be obsequious because what else are they going to do? So and that's a point that people miss on this, is that if you're going to blackmail very powerful people, Jeffrey Epstein as a college dropout from a blue collar family, he's not going to blackmail very powerful people by himself, but he has to have an organization behind him. Same with Craig Spence.

Could you talk about another one of the major figures in this book here is a man named Gary Caradori, he was a private detective, could you talk about how he got involved in the case, what he investigated, what he found out, and what happened to him? Gary Caradori was an amazing investigator. He had retired from the Nebraska State Patrol, who is dirty in all this by the way, they helped cover up this pedophile network. Well, just about every legal entity in Nebraska helped cover up this pedophile network, but Gary Caradori, he was a hard charging private eye, he ran a corporation that was called

Caratorp, it had over 200 employees, and he was one of the best private detectives in the United States at that time. He would dress up as a priest, he had all kinds of costumes, and he had a passion for finding kids that had been enmeshed in the sex trade. So when this subcommittee formed, after the subcommittee formed initially to look at King's Looting of $40 million, but then the social service personnel came to the Senate subcommittee and said, you know, there's a pedophile network going on. So the Nebraska subcommittee ultimately hired Gary Caradori.

And Gary Caradori was, he was a whirlwind, and he was finding new victims and videotaping them. I've got like 200 flight receipts of Laurence King's, most of them go to Washington, D.C., and that was because of Gary Caradori, he was very good at working the streets. And he realized that the FBI was trying to set him up for scripting the child abuse allegations. I mean, that's how desperate they were. And with the Franklin scandal, and I also believe with the Epstein scandal, if the Domino's had started falling in Omaha, they would have fallen all the way to Washington, D.C.

So it was imperative to keep that covered up. And there were a number of people that died mysteriously. But getting back to Gary Caradori, he knew that he had to find definitive proof of this pedophon network, and because these kids that had come forward, they were, they had been repeatedly molested, given drugs. It's kind of a perfect system because you take these kids, generally from lower socioeconomic backgrounds, and then they're molested repeatedly, and then they're, and then one of the carrots is drugs.

So by the time they lose their youthful marketability, they're expunged by the network. And then they go on to commit crimes to support their rug habit, and ultimately, they end up in jail and thereby hurt their own credibility. So Gary Caradori had, he had found a number of these kids. Actually, I've got his leads list. He's got 60 vacants on the leads list. And my job was to go, he was an amazing investigator. And I've got all his daily logs.

My job was to find these 60 kids, because these kids don't generally use, you know, if you're in a network like that and you're expunged, chances are you're not using your social security number very often. But anyway, so Gary Caradori, the FBI had his phones tapped. They were, he was perpetually followed. He would set up meetings with witnesses or victims, and the FBI agents would already be there. He realized that he needed to get some very definitive proof.

And he went for blackmail pictures. And he met Rusty Nelson. Now I've got five corroborations for this, that he met Rusty Nelson. He flew a Cessna to Chicago under the auspices of the All-Star Game, the MLB All-Star Game. And he was with his son. And there he met Rusty Nelson. And I believe that Rusty Nelson gave him pictures. I've got five corroborations on that, as I said.

And when he was flying back, his plane blew up over Lee County, Illinois. And he was killed, and his son was killed. And he, throughout his entire investigation, he had this leather anti-shake case, or briefcase. And it never left his side. And that's where the pictures would have been. And that anti-shake case was never found in the debris. And if you look at my rendition of what happened there, I'm confident to say that Gary Caradorian and his son were murdered.

He could not make it back to Nebraska with the blackmail pictures. Because as I said, if Dominoes started flying in Omaha, they would have fallen all the way to Washington, D.C. To have note, you mentioned in the book that, after his death, the Franklin Committee, the Franklin Committee was at a government body that was set up to investigate this? It was a Senate subcommittee. It was a Senate subcommittee. So, after his death, they appointed former CIA director William Colby to investigate the

plane crash. What did he conclude about the plane crash? Okay, so this is what I've got, I mean, I put it in the book, too. And this is kind of interesting. William Colby investigated Caradorian's death. Now he told people who were affiliated with the Franklin Committee, and he also told Gary Caradorian's wife that Gary Caradorian had been assassinated. But he wasn't willing to state that publicly.

Now William Colby had a very, very strange death. And William Colby was kind of interesting as a CIA director. During the church hearings in 1977, two CIA directors were called Dick Helms, and then William Colby, who was then the CIA director. Dick Helms didn't say a word, but Colby surrendered a lot of the CIA's little secrets about killing people and the mind control stuff, actually penetrating the media, all that stuff. It was called The Family Jewels, and Colby spilled all of that. And he was pretty cool with everything he did, and he was actually head of the Phoenix

program, which assassinated 20,000 or so innocent Vietnamese. So he had done some pretty ominous stuff, but I've been told that he had reembraced Catholicism and he was cool with everything that he had done, except he just didn't, the kids, the way that the intelligence had used children, he just couldn't reconcile that with that. And according to this source, he was going to out the CIA for that. Now, I don't know if the source is telling the truth or not, but William Colby had a very strange death. He went canoeing in April, and he was sick, and it was a cold night, and his dinner was

on the table. And then he wasn't found for about a week, and then they found him right where he'd basically dumped the canoe, and he didn't have any shoes on. I mean, he was 76, and he's going canoeing in really cold weather without any shoes. So that's a suspicious death in my book. Now, is that because Colby was going to blow the whistle on the CIA's use of children? I just don't know. With Colby too, I will add that he also seemed to have been in the middle of making dinner,

and his computer was on, like in the middle of some document, and I don't know what the document was. It seemed like he had, if he really did die, like just canoeing, a canoeing accident in the middle of the night, he stopped both things he was doing and decided, well, might as well get a ride in before I fully finish making dinner or bring his letter. Yeah, it's quite anomalous. His kid came out with a documentary, and I think that there was a lot of estrangement there between him and his, I believe it was his oldest son.

And his oldest son felt it was a suicide, but William Colby had remarried. He seemed happy with his wife. They seemed to be in love. As I said, he had re-embraced Catholicism. I mean, that doesn't mean that people are incomprehensible and they kill each other or kill themselves for very strange reasons, but yeah, William Colby's death is definitely an enigma, and I don't see how someone can draw a definitive conclusion on whether or not he was, I mean, his son believes it was suicide.

I believe it was murder. People can draw their own conclusions. Right. It's not impossible that, like, you know, he was in the middle of doing something and just, I don't know, got hit with a ping of skills or whatever. It's not totally impossible, but it is very strange. I mean, if you're eating dinner and you say, you know, I'm not even going to finish this meal, I'm just going to go kill myself, that would be, you know, it's kind of abnormal

human behavior, I would think. I mean, like I said, humans are kind of incomprehensible, but yes, it would be quite anomalous. Well, some people like lunch more. Nick, I guess, like, just like the most heartbreaking, like, really the hardest stuff in your book to take on and really, like, I don't know, just take into your mind are the accounts of the victims themselves. And I'm just wondering, like, as a journalist, you know, seeking these people out, hearing their stories, like, you know, which are, you know, really, really hard to, really hard

to think about, really hard to write about, I'm sure. But, like, how is a journalist, do you, you know, find these people, sort of form relationship to them, but also, as a journalist, have to maintain a kind of distance or a skepticism, and then certainly in light of what you just said, which is really one of the most horrific parts of this story, is that they are all, in some way, rendered not credible by the things that have happened to them, because, like, you know, in all of them, as you might imagine in various ways, are dealing with, you know, have dealt or have dealt with drug addiction, mental illness, incarceration, so that when you put them on a witness stand

or you reprint their story, it's not that hard for, you know, a defense attorney or the media or whatever to say, oh, like, these claims are, like, these claims are so outlandish, you know, like, the names that they're saying, like, what they're alleging is so unspeakable, but then, like, you know, look at who the person is saying it is, like, I mean, like, like, how do you deal with that, that give and take between the human beings, whose stories that you're recording, and this horrible fact of what's happened to them, and, like, a sort of a journalistic skepticism or rigor? Well, I was fortunate, getting back to Gary Caridori, he had a leads list that had 60

victims. So, the victims that I found, except for one, were on Gary Caridori's leads list. So he had vetted them, essentially, for me. And it was up to me to find them, and as I said earlier, a lot of them don't really use their social security numbers too often, it was up to me to find them, and then get them to talk. Now, sometimes, I could find them, and then they would talk to me that day. Other times, I would spend a lot of time finding a victim, and the conversation would last

about 13 seconds. It was Alicia Owen, it took me quite some time for her to trust me. She had been sentenced to nine to 15 years for telling the truth, and put in solitary for two years. So, she's very cautious about who she lets into her life. And now, here's an interesting anecdote. One of the kids on Gary Caridori's leads list was Rue Fox. And Rue had been a Boysdown student.

I mean, he'd been in multiple foster care programs before that, and been molested. And King brutally molested him when he was at Boysdown. And he required stitches, which was done at, I believe, the Boysdown. The Boysdown is an incorporated city. They have their own police force, they have their own post office, they have their own zip codes. So, I mean, Boysdown is kind of like a closed system. So it's very easy for them to cover up child abuse.

And I could not find Rue. I looked for him for about three years. Now, I wasn't looking for him like full time, but if I had a little extra time, I'd say, I'm going to look for this guy, or I'm going to look for that guy. And I was in Nebraska, and I had like six addresses for Rue. He was quite nomadic. And I went to all six, and I came up empty. Finally, I hired a private detective.

And she found him, where she found where his father lived. And I called up, and she told me, this guy is a very dangerous guy, very dangerous, and be really cautious with him. He's done 10 years for Aunt Robbery, and he's got a rap sheet that's like two feet long. So I called Rue, I got his father's phone number, he was living with his father, I called him up. And he said, are you a cop? And I said, no, no, I'm a journalist.

And he goes, I'll meet you, but if you're a cop, I'm going to snap your neck. And then we met at this bar, to say that this was a sleazy bar would actually be kind of charitable. We met at this bar that he chose, and I ordered a cranberry juice, which I really felt like I was going to get E. coli or salmonella from. And I was there girding myself to meet Rue, and all of a sudden Rue burst through the front door, and he's got two people with him. And I got up to say hi to him, and he goes, back here.

So I'm in this back room, I definitely know where the exit is, because I know that things could get ugly here really quickly. And Rue said, are you a cop? Are you a cop? And I said, no, I'm not a cop, I'm not a cop. And then I showed him this documentation that I had on him, where he'd been at Boystown and then he'd been at this foster care home. And then at that point, he believed me.

But he hadn't thought about that in many, many years. He said, you opened the wrong door, because he got very, very angry when he started remembering how he was abused as a child. So this is my last day in Nebraska, at least for this trip. I've been there for a while. And I said, well, I'm going to try Rue one more time, and hopefully I'm unscathed. So I go up to Rue, he's working on a car in the driveway, and he goes, you know, I've been thinking about talking to you.

Let's talk. And then I interviewed him, and the 12-year-old, I mean, his suit of armor came off. And the 12-year-old that was damaged, really damaged, came out and he just broke down crying. He was that very damaged 12-year-old. And so that's one account of, I mean, and I've dealt with a lot of survivors since then, investigating Epstein, where journalists make a big mistake is that, like with Rue, I mean, you open that up. I opened that up, and I had to help him put it back together, and Rue was shooting crystal

meth and drinking vodka, and I got him into a rehab program. So when you're dealing with survivors, it's not like you're dealing with the average person that you're going to interview. You have to be cautious, not only for yourself, but for them emotionally, it's very important. We're seeing Julie Brown, who broke the, of the Miami Herald, who did the three-part Epstein series. She's getting sued by two of those survivors, Epstein survivors. And what journalists don't understand is that you, if you're going to open these doors

and talk to survivors, you have an extra level of responsibility. And I've tried to have that with the victims. Now Rue, we kept in touch, but then he went back to where he, and I've never been able to find him since. So his father's died, and yeah. So I have no idea if Rue is alive or not. I would say, if he was hitting it like he was hitting it, I would say he's probably not alive.

I guess, like, to bring it to the present moment, I guess, like, this is my last question for you, like, to read your book, and then obviously, like, you know, to know what one knows about the Epstein case, I'm just wondering, what do you make of this current political moment in which accusations of pedophilia, grooming, and child abuse are becoming more and more commonplace, and I would say deployed in an incredibly grim, cynical, and glib manner. And accusations directed at teachers, even children themselves, or elected politicians. You know, on the one hand, like, you read about the Franklin Credit Scandal, about Epstein, it's like, it's not hard to believe, and in fact, it's actually, like, factually documented

that, as we've just been talking about here, these networks of elite child predation reach to the highest levels of power in this country. People know about that, but now it's like, that accusation is being used, particularly by people. I mean, and the Franklin Credit story, I mean, like, it's reaching the highest levels of the Republican Party, specifically. And now, in this case, they're the ones that are, you know, like, the men in power are using it to slander, like, gay people or their political opponents.

What do you make of the uses and abuses of these narratives of elite child abuse in the contemporary media and our politics? Well, I mean, you've got the QAnon stuff, which those people are definitely misguided, absolutely. But then you've got the other side, there's an article in The Atlantic that talks about all, you know, child trafficking is fake. And I wrote an email to that writer, she was talking about all these fake trafficking networks, and I told her that there are trafficking networks.

And the thing about it is, these kids are, get so damaged when they are molested young, it's really difficult for them to have a decent life afterwards. But when you get into the numbers, now, the CDC estimates that 25% of women and the CDC generally errors on the side of cautiousness, but the CDC says 25% of women have been molested as minors. According to the CDC, a quarter of the women in America have been molested as minors. That translates into millions and millions of women that are, that have been molested. And the CDC says, I believe, 6% to 8% for boys, but I think that it's actually higher

than that. But if you're going to go with those numbers, millions of people have been sexually abused, and they suffer in silence. There has been some abuse in my family, not my nuclear family, but in my extended family. And you know, I've seen the kind of devastation that that brings. So to be in one of these networks where you're very young and treated like meat and repeatedly molested, and some of these, some of these sadists, some of these pedophiles in the Franklin Network were sadists, and some of these pedophiles in the Epstein Network were sadists.

And the mainstream media has decided that 14 is the demarcation for the Epstein victims, and though I have accounts of them being younger than, well, there's, there's written accounts of them being 11 or 12, but I have accounts of them being even younger than that. So when you have that type of damage done to such a young person, it's very, and then ultimately generally results in associative identity disorder, and it takes a long, that is a long road for a person to put themselves back together. And it's going to require a lot of, they're going to require a lot of help once they reach that point, that level of damage.

I guess kind of like an answer to that last question. Less about QAnon, more about like the current like spat of culture issues from the conservative side, where, you know, basically like if a teacher appears to be gay, like at all, it's grooming. And it's, it is, it's definitely like a concerted, the main thing behind this is to destroy public education. They've pretty much like said as much. Do you, do you think that like any part of this is deflecting attention away from this?

Because with some of this new crop, like one of the guys who's very big on this, this stuff, James Lindsay is like repeatedly hanging out with people who were part of the nexium cult. I'm pretty sure you're familiar with that. Do you think that there is like a, an acknowledged goal of deflection or it's just the, the main political aspect is the most important thing. Well, the thing about it is with the Franklin scandal, you had Republicans molesting little boys and with Epstein, you had Democrats molesting little girls. The reason why these things stay covered up is because people on both sides of the aisle

are molesting minors and engaged in aberrant behavior, extramarital behavior, and they're compromised. So that is their bond, that is their omerta. When I see like the James Lindsay's of the world, I definitely, like I said, I think QAnon is misguided, James Lindsay at his best is misguided. But as I said earlier, 25% of women in our country have been molested as a minor. So there's a lot of women out there that are suffering in silence. So as a society, we can do better than what we've done as far as opening this up.

And it is getting better, but I think we need to do better. The Me Too movement was somewhat helpful, but the Me Too movement did not help the Epstein survivors at all. The Me Too movement refused to help the Epstein survivors, which I just find completely mind boggling. But as a society, we have to get this, we have to work this out. We're never going to be able to stop all child abuse. We can certainly stop state-affiliated abuse like Franklin and also Epstein.

And I believe this, if you can take one thing out of our society, if you can take just one thing, if you can take child sexual abuse out of our society, the prisons wouldn't be filled, the psychiatric hospitals wouldn't be filled. Our society would be very, look very, very different. And I truly believe that. Actually, last question for you, if you look up Franklin Credit Scandal on Wikipedia, you will go to a page and the headline is, Franklin Credit Scandal Hokes. And that is the only thing that you see on the Wikipedia about Franklin Credit.

And it is basically just says in less than a paragraph that it is the result of an elaborate hoax that has been perpetrated. Or tarring it with instances of the satanic panic like the McMartin preschool hysteria, which was a hoax, not a hoax, but it wasn't real. How did this come to pass? How is Wikipedia, this kind of public clearinghouse of information and knowledge, certainly there is enough documentation to suggest that at the very least, what's being alleged here is not, or some, if not all of it, is not just made up.

Or how would such an elaborate hoax even be perpetrated at this point? Because you just like, just briefly, like, how did Wikipedia or the official clearinghouse of public information come to deem this story as a hoax? Wikipedia, when you get into certain political things, Wikipedia often takes a, you know, a different stance than what is the reality. If you go to the talk page on Wikipedia, there have been battles waged over that Wikipedia page, battles. There's pages and pages and pages and pages.

But there are these custodians of that page that refuse to let anything coherent and cogent about the Franklin scandal on that page. And on my website, Nick Bryant, I've got a blog where I talk about the problem with Wikipedia and I show the big battles that have been waged on Wikipedia. And I've gone all the way to the top of the Wikipedia food chain and I've never been able to change it. Now that page is locked with what's there. And there's been myself and a number of people that have tried to make changes, but that

these quote-unquote editors will always make that, will always make the Franklin, quote-unquote Franklin allegations nonsensical. And here's the thing about that. Why are they still covering it up all these years later? This is 30 years later. Why are they still covering it up? Why are these editors still covering it up? Because I believe, and Epstein has proved this, that these intelligence entities run

pedophile networks. And that is, so with Franklin, it's like you're on Omaha Beach on D-Day. They're not going to give you an inch. These editors are not going to give you an inch because they want to keep that narrative as ridiculous and constricted as possible. And that Wikipedia page has costed me probably a lot of money because I've come very close to having some success in Hollywood with this story, but people in Hollywood don't read books or maybe there's two or three people in Hollywood that read books, I don't know.

But they just go to the Wikipedia page and then they don't read the Franklin scandal. And this is kind of interesting, I was, it was about 12 years ago and I was in Hollywood or LA pitching the Franklin scandal. And a friend of mine hooked me up with these two young, hungry movie executives. And I gave them each, I met them and I gave them each a copy of the Franklin scandal. And then, and my friend had known them for a number of years. And then my friend sent me a email exchange that they had had. And they were discussing what was true and what wasn't true about the Franklin scandal

and they had never read it, so, and then throw in the Wikipedia page and then I'm dead in the water. Well, I mean, just like for someone who's researched this as deeply as you have, like for these editors engaging in these battles, I mean, what's the thing that they hang their hat on to label this a hoax? Or a conspiracy theory? That's what they say it is. And if you look at the, if you go to the talk and you'll see, or else you can go to my website

and I've got a blog, The Trouble with Wikipedia, where I show excerpts, they control it. And I've actually, I spent a lot of time at one point, I had some time and, and then there were other people that wanted to change it and these guys would not budge an inch. And as I said earlier, as I went up the Wikipedia food chain, they were, they were backed up. So that Wikipedia page has caused me, not only probably caused me, but it's just caused me a lot of pain because a lot of kids were molested in that Franklin network. And for Wikipedia to be like that is just terrific. But was any, was like, has anyone ever supplied a justification or counter evidence or counter

claims that would, that would, that would justify their, their, their sort of blockade of the, of, of this, of this story? They, they quote the mainstream media. And that's it. Yeah. And the mainstream, according to the mainstream media, this was the mainstream media went with the judiciary and carefully crafted hoax. It was quite a cover up.

I mean, and Epstein too, it's been quite a cover up. I was, what's kind of troubled me though, is I thought that if a Franklin happened today with the internet, that we could get to the bottom of it and the Epstein network happened and I got Epstein's black book in 2012, I could not get anybody to do anything with it until 2015. And that was with Gawker and we put it up on, on the web. So this is, the Epstein network has been covered up in broad daylight in the middle of America.

And I find that extremely troubling. All right. I think, I think that's a good place to leave it. Nick Bryant, the book is the Franklin Scandal. Nick, if people would like to read more of your reporting or listening to your, listen to your podcast that's coming out, what should they do? You can go to my website, nickbryantnyc.com, and we've got a podcast link there. And then you can follow me on Twitter, Nick, double under space, Bryant.

And I've got a, I've written another book about sexual political blackmail, as I said earlier, the Confessions of a DC Madame. And I've got a book coming out this July about Watergate. And one of the things that people don't understand about Watergate is a major part of Watergate was the CISexual Blackmail operation. And I really elucidate that in this book and I've got a tremendous amount of corroboration on it. And that book will be out in July and that's called The Truth About Watergate, A Tale of

Extraordinary Lines and Lawyers. Okay. Nick Bryant, thank you so much for your time. The book is the Franklin Scandal. Thank you, Nick. Thank you. Thank you.