The events in this chapter just disgust me,and quite frankly leave a very bitter taste in mouth with regard to what is supposed to be a Federal agency in service to the people of this country. If this was an isolated incident it would be easier to stomach,but the continuing actions of this agency since Franklin, with regard to the two Twin Tower incidents,Waco,OK City and Boston and it's aftermath among other incidents, makes it clear to me. We are dealing with a real life Gestapo in service to The State. This Gestapo(think of it's involvement in the latest fiasco holding the countries attention hostage) like the so called federal reserve is a criminal enterprise in need of disbandment,and the guilty held accountable for their ongoing myriad crimes against the American people...
By Nick Bryant
—Chapter Two—
Caradori
After the resignations of Kirk Naylor and Jerry Lowe in July of 1989, Senator
Schmit and the Franklin Committee conscripted Lincoln attorney John Stevens
Berry and his law firm to replace Naylor as the Committee’s counsel. In addition to
reviewing the Committee’s previous reports and testimony, Berry and his law firm
quickly negotiated the Committee’s access to the previously withheld Nebraska
Attorney General’s reports, and to the financial records of Larry King and the credit
union impounded by the NCUA.
At the behest of Berry, Schmit and the Committee looked to Gary Caradori as the
Committee’s next investigator—Berry described Caradori as “the finest private
investigator in this part of the country.” The forty-year-old Caradori was the CEO
of the Lincoln-based Caracorp Inc., which provided a wide array of security and
investigative services, numbering 120 employees in eight states.
Though Caradori was the CEO of a large security and investigative agency, he was
a seasoned, relentless, and hands-on gumshoe, and his passion was finding missing
persons, particularly abducted children and teenage girls enmeshed in drugs and
prostitution. Over the years, the Lincoln Journal and Lincoln Journal-Star had
published a number of articles on Caradori’s daring exploits. One article, “Lincoln
Private Detective Walks Nation’s Mean Streets,” described Caradori’s stealthy feats
on the gritty streets of New York, Los Angeles, and Las Vegas. The article reported
that Caradori posed in the undercover disguises of a priest or a plumber to infiltrate
brothels and the inner sanctums of Mafiosi to find and retrieve young women
ensnared in prostitution. “If I didn’t have to make a living, I’d track them down for
free,” Caradori said in the article. In another article, the Lincoln Journal showered
him with accolades: “When the police tell you their hands are tied.... When your
only witness has skipped town and when the justice system seems like it’s breaking
apart, people call Gary Caradori.”
Born April 15, 1949, Caradori was the second of Leno and Mary Caradori’s five
sons and two daughters. The Caradori family lived in a split-level house in the small
township of Ralston, southwest of Omaha. The Caradoris were an archetypal
Midwestern family from the 1950s: Leno was a teacher at Boys Town and Mary a
homemaker. In 1964, Gary Caradori attended Ralston High School as a freshman.
At the onset of his freshman year, as Caradori entered the school building, he held
the door open for Sandi Anderson, also a freshman—it was love at first sight. They
were married in 1969. The couple had two sons—Sean was born in 1974 and
Andrew James (A.J.) in 1981.
Shortly after graduating from high school in 1967, Caradori was drafted into the United States Coast Guard, and, following basic training at Cape May, New Jersey, he was transferred to Alaska, where his duties included handling teletype messages and directing aircraft. In 1969, the Coast Guard sent the nineteen-year-old Caradori to study anti-submarine warfare at Radarman School on Governors Island, New York.
Caradori spent the next two years abroad on the Coast Guard Cutter Mellon, serving one year in Vietnam. As a 2nd Class Radarman on the Mellon, Caradori demonstrated innate leadership skills, supervising eight men.
After receiving an honorable discharge from the Coast Guard in 1971, Caradori joined the Nebraska State Patrol. He impressed his NSP supervisors with his leadership qualities and instinctive investigative talents, and they promptly placed him in charge of one of the state’s six Mobile Crime Evidence Vans. At the age of 23, Caradori transferred to the NSP’s Criminal Division, one of the youngest men ever to have been appointed an NSP Investigator. There he refined his investigative skills by enrolling in numerous FBI-sponsored training curricula, including Snipers, Bomb Threats and Hostage School, Criminal Investigation Photo Lab School, and Sex Crime Investigation.
Caradori possessed a strong entrepreneurial spirit, and he left the NSP in “good standing” in March 1977 to become the co-proprietor of JC Security and Detective Agency. Four years later, he formed a second partnership: Caradori/Weatherl Investigations. In February 1989, the industrious Caradori underwent a final entrepreneurial incarnation, becoming the founder of Caracorp, which landed investigative contracts from a number of corporate powerhouses—ConAgra, Cargill, and Archer Daniels Midland. Caradori was clearly a man on the escalator of upward mobility.
According to Caradori, Senator Loran Schmit made an unannounced visit to the offices of Caracorp on an August afternoon in 1989. Caradori felt that the senator was “lucky” to catch him, because stationary days at the office were a rarity for him: He was usually in perpetual motion, traveling in excess of 150,000 miles a year. Caradori assumed his usual seat behind his cherry wood roll-top desk, and Schmit seated himself in one of the well-padded leather chairs facing it. Both men were licensed pilots, and Caradori later said that Schmit broke the ice by discussing airplanes and other generalities before broaching the subject of Franklin. Caradori had spent nine of the previous twelve months working around the country, and he wasn’t familiar with the particulars of Franklin—Caradori initially thought that the Franklin Credit Union was just “another bank that went under.”
At the conclusion of Schmit and Caradori’s initial meeting, Caradori was invited to meet with the entire Franklin Committee the following week at the statehouse. After the Committee members interviewed Caradori for two hours, he left the room while they voted on his appointment. He was then ushered back before the Committee, and they informed him that he had been retained as their new investigator. Though Caradori had the razor-sharp street smarts of an extraordinary detective, it would take him weeks before he realized the full scope and malevolence of the corruption he was investigating.
On August 21, Caradori plunged into the Franklin investigation with his usual tenacity and zeal. His initial foray included devouring the reports and memos generated by Jerry Lowe and all the previous documentation and testimony collected by the Franklin Committee. Whereas Lowe had conducted an investigation of the federal and state investigations, Caradori was committed to carrying out his own investigation. Early on, Caradori received a call from a friend who was an OPD lieutenant—his friend cautioned him of the looming danger ahead, saying that the sexual component of Franklin had been covered up from the start.
Caradori assigned Karen Ormiston to be his principal assistant in the investigation. A trusted employee of Caradori’s for over six years, she was Caracorp’s office coordinator and business manager. Together they had complementary investigative styles that paralleled the choreography of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers: Caradori would lead, gathering extensive evidence in a whirlwind of intensity; Ormiston would follow up, collating and processing the evidence.
From the onset of the investigation, several obstacles confronted Caradori and his staff. Many of Caradori’s “Investigative Reports” from August and September note that he faced the formidable barriers of “distrust” and a pall of fear as he attempted to cultivate confidential informants or simply interview individuals who had previously volunteered information—they suspected that the Franklin Committee was merely serving the function of a continuing cover-up. Moreover, they feared that divulging specific or personal information would be a surefire way to blow their anonymity, because their disclosures would inevitably be published in the World-Herald. Caradori quickly came to the realization that it was imperative to nurture the withering civic trust; so he sent a September memo to the Franklin Committee, insisting it was “crucial” that nothing be published implicating specific individuals until his investigation was completed.
In addition to widespread distrust, Caradori also encountered enemies he hadn’t anticipated. Caradori’s wife, Sandi, a middle school English teacher, informed me that a family friend confirmed a troubling hunch of her husband’s. “An old friend of ours who used to work for Lincoln Telephone came to our house and told us that our phones were tapped,” she said. “Gary already suspected it was the FBI, because when he arranged meetings over the phone FBI agents would already be at the designated place when he arrived.”
Ormiston also felt that her phones were tapped, prompting Caradori to send a letter to Lincoln Telephone, requesting that the company provide him with information concerning their lines being tapped or monitored. After a Lincoln Telephone representative received the letter, he phoned Caradori and relayed that the information he requested required a court order or a subpoena. According to Ormiston, a subpoena was served on Lincoln Telephone, but the company refused to honor it.
The vast majority of today’s US telephone exchanges employ digital technology, which enables telephone monitoring to be conducted from remote distances. In 1989, however, the monitoring connection generally had to be applied directly to the line of the phone being tapped, and the wiretaps occasionally resulted in telephonic glitches for the monitored individual—Ormiston related an anecdote about a telephone snafu at Caracorp.
“When our office phones started malfunctioning,” she commented, “Gary contacted his friend at Lincoln Telephone who stopped by our office. After he fidgeted with our jacks for a few minutes, he electronically zeroed in on a room where we heard people talking. They eventually realized that their jack was open and suddenly cut it off.”
In addition to tapped phones, Caradori had to start dealing with home intruders. On September 14, 1989, while Caradori and his wife were out with friends and their two sons were at home sleeping, someone entered their home around 10:00 P.M. The Caradori’s oldest son was alerted to the trespasser by the family’s dogs, and then he heard a door being opened and closed. Caradori filed a trespassing report with the Lincoln Police Department—the intruder was never apprehended.
In newspaper reportage of Caradori’s derring-do adventures, he discussed the investigative necessity of nurturing a network of contacts and informants, and he quickly incorporated that modus operandi into his Franklin investigation. Within weeks of commencing the investigation, his records confirm that he had several meetings with “confidential informants.” He also started zigzagging the streets and bars of Omaha to cultivate additional informants. The street buzz was rife with rumors corroborating Larry King’s abuse of children and enabled Caradori to identify other perpetrators. At this point in the investigation, it wasn’t uncommon for Caradori to log over one-hundred-hour weeks, talking to scores of unsavory individuals in sordid, nocturnal haunts. Sandi Caradori told me that her husband started taking long, hot showers to relax physically, and seemingly cleanse the investigation’s dark residue from his soul.
Caradori scrambled for leads on the streets and from informants, and also adhered to the Watergate refrain of following the money—two investigative techniques that are not mutually exclusive. To follow the money, Caradori originally received help from the NCUA. After Franklin was closed, the NCUA had set up a “reconstruction office” in Omaha to decipher the whereabouts of the missing $40 million. The stacked boxes there contained thousands of checks, invoices, receipts, etc.
The NCUA initially granted Caradori and Ormiston access to the reconstruction office during normal business hours Monday through Friday, and they were allowed to make copies of documentation they deemed relevant to their investigation. A ranking NCUA official in Washington, DC also provided Caradori with leads.
At the NCUA reconstruction office, Caradori and Ormiston managed to find boxes containing scores of receipts from various air charter services. The flight receipts rarely listed passengers, or would merely list “Larry King.” The receipts also revealed that King charted Lear jets on an almost weekly basis. Though King jetted to numerous locations throughout the country, his favored destination was Washington, DC.
The flight receipts presented Caradori with a fresh avenue of investigation that he maneuvered with his customary doggedness. A September Investigative Report indicated that Caradori contacted a charter service in Columbus, Ohio repeatedly used by King, but the company’s lawyer rebuffed his request for flight records, demanding a subpoena. Unfortunately, the Franklin Committee’s subpoena power had no standing outside the borders of Nebraska.
In October 1989, Caradori made contact with the pilot of a second charter service frequented by King. The pilot informed Caradori that he had piloted King, two teenage boys, and a teenage girl to Los Angeles. Caradori phoned another pilot from the same charter service who acknowledged that minors accompanied King on flights.
In a later Investigative Report, Caradori described his meeting with a former employee of a third charter service used by King. Though the woman was apprehensive about having her name connected to the “Franklin investigation,” she disclosed that King used her charter service on a weekly basis. She said he routinely traveled with a number of young men: “very good looking,” dressed in fancy suits, and “clean cut and clean shaven.” The young men, she remarked, never spoke, which she found strange.
Caradori and Ormiston called on a fourth charter service patronized by King located in Sioux City, Iowa. They met with the company’s chief executive, who instructed his secretary to direct them to a basement room where their records were stored— Caradori and Ormiston then began to burrow through the company’s countless records. Caradori must have felt like a miner striking gold when he found Franklin Credit Union itineraries listing children whose names had surfaced during his investigation. As Caradori continued to burrow, Ormiston snatched the itineraries and darted to a nearby copy machine. While Caradori scanned the itineraries, he came across one that had a sticker on it denoting a previous FBI inquiry.
When Caradori and Ormiston were on the verge of leaving the charter service with their newfound cache, the company’s chief executive barged into the room and demanded that they leave without the copied itineraries. Caradori grudgingly acquiesced to abandoning the itineraries, but they were a sterling lead that his tenacious disposition was disinclined to relinquish without a fight. Because the Franklin Committee’s subpoenas lacked authority in Iowa, he phoned his NCUA contact in DC and implored him to authorize a federal subpoena for the company’s flight itineraries. The NCUA official consented to subpoena the charter service’s records.
As Caradori awaited the prized itineraries, he was slapped with a federal subpoena that demanded he surrender Franklin evidence to the FBI. Caradori found the subpoena to be particularly vexing, because the Committee routinely surrendered its evidence to state and federal authorities. He nonetheless complied with the subpoena and delivered a bundle of files to Omaha’s FBI headquarters.
He glanced at the desk of the FBI agent receiving the files, and he noticed a stack of documents from the charter service in Sioux City, Iowa. Weeks later, Caradori walked into Senator Schmit’s office at the statehouse—Schmit was talking on the phone but handed him a large envelope containing the subpoenaed itineraries. Caradori leafed through the itineraries and quickly realized that they had been altered—all the incriminating information relating to the interstate transportation of children had been deleted.
At the onset of an investigation, first-rate investigators make few, if any, assumptions as they’re stalking their initial leads. And Caradori’s earliest forays into Franklin resulted in his treading metaphorical avenues and alleyways that were fruitful, fallow, or downright bizarre, and his interactions with Michael Casey would encompass all three. In the role of a “freelance journalist,” Casey had been delving into Franklin for months, scouring Omaha’s seedy underside, accruing contacts and tantalizing tidbits. In fact, he co-authored that early, relatively superficial article about Franklin in the Village Voice in February 1989.
Casey had a talent for blarney and drinking vast quantities of liquor, two talents that often accompany and complement each other. In a testament to Casey’s gift of blarney, he reportedly convinced the Los Angeles Times that he had the underworld connections to locate then-fugitive Patty Hearst, and the paper bankrolled his ill fated high jinks. Casey also had a talent for absconding with the money of concerned Nebraska citizens and compelling them to give him shelter. He even talked the NSP into footing the bill for a motel, where he freely availed himself of movie rentals. According to the NSP, Casey had a long rap sheet, which included forgery, credit card fraud, and alcohol-related driving infractions, resulting in various convictions and incarcerations.
Caradori first became aware of Casey from one of Jerry Lowe’s reports, and he found Casey crashing at the home of an Omaha talk radio personality. Caradori and Ormiston visited the latter’s home and talked to both Casey and his host—Casey’s Franklin materials were displayed throughout the living room. The radio personality would become disillusioned with Casey after a month or so and give him the boot. After Casey’s departure, an employee of the phone company visited the radio personality’s home and told him his home phones had been tapped, too.
Because of Casey’s ability to spin convincing yet contradictory yarns, his sketchy history is a complex tapestry of truth and falsehoods and, perhaps, grand intentions yet destructive actions. In 1974, after a stint in prison, Casey briefly served as Boys Town’s “special projects director,” but according to the World-Herald, he was fired for taking the confidential case histories of residents and sending the files to MGM in an effort to sell a television series based on the orphanage. Though Casey claimed that Boys Town had given him permission to take the files, Father Hupp emphatically stated that permission was never granted. Hupp said Casey picketed the main gate at Boys Town to protest his termination.
Given Casey’s dodgy history, Caradori’s cultivation of him as a source may seem questionable, but Casey allegedly had information to offer: Casey initially told Caradori that he had access to a videotape showing Larry King engaged in sexual acts with children and had also conducted an audiotape interview with a former Boys Town student who discussed being molested by Peter Citron, an Omaha World-Herald columnist and one of the prominent Nebraskans whom Caradori’s early sources had tied to King’s pandering network. Caradori concluded that the videotape never existed, but he quickly acquired the audiotape of the Boys Town student.
In the interview, the Boys Town student, who was then a senior, told Casey that he met Citron on the Boys Town campus, where Citron was reporting on the filming of a movie about Boys Town—Miracle of the Heart. The Boys Town student said that he was fifteen years old when Citron molested him. He maintained that their association lasted three months and that he visited Citron’s home on numerous occasions. The student said he initially didn’t report Citron to Boys Town staff, but came forward a year later when he became aware that Citron was preying on a second Boys Town student. Though the student talked to Boys Town staff and an OPD officer regarding the molestation, nothing ever came of his allegations. In fact, he spotted Citron on the Boys Town campus even after he had given his information to Boys Town staff.
Caradori’s Investigative Reports noted that he made an assiduous effort to talk to the former Boys Town student whom Casey interviewed. After they exchanged a number of phone calls, he finally agreed to meet Caradori. When Caradori and Ormiston showed up at his apartment at the agreed upon time, he was nowhere to be found. But four days later Caradori finally managed to have a face-to-face meeting with the former student.
The young man was ambivalent about granting Caradori a formal interview, because he didn’t want his name in the newspaper, and, strangely enough, he was concerned about his disclosures sullying Boys Town’s reputation. He told Caradori and Ormiston that he had to give some thought to making a formal statement. Approximately two weeks later he consented to meet with Caradori and Ormiston, but, again, he stood them up. Caradori would eventually receive a phone call from the young man’s sister—she relayed to him that her brother was “extremely scared” to talk because the FBI and NSP had been “harassing” him. [The Gestapo being passed off as an FBI here in America needs to go, like yesterday,corrupt,inept, do not even begin to cover it DC]
In addition to acquiring Casey’s interview, Caradori spent a handful of nights rummaging the streets and bars with Casey, but he wrote he found Casey’s drunkenness counterproductive to forging further leads. In the second week of September, Caradori made his final throw of the dice with Casey, and it revolved around Franklin’s Rosetta Stone: pictures of King and company engaged in sexual acts with children. Casey had fostered a tenuous relationship with one of the photographers employed by King, and Casey claimed he could score illicit pictures for $300. Though Caradori was dubious, his notes make clear he felt risking $300 for the possibility, albeit scant, of acquiring visual proof of King’s illicit acts would be acceptable. Casey never came through with the photographs, and Caradori completely disengaged from him. Nebraska law enforcement later accused Caradori of naïveté and of being “duped” by Casey, but the NSP had accommodated Casey in a hotel for three nights and four days, and it hadn’t even acquired his audiotape of the Boys Town student.
Caradori had a final, curt encounter with Casey at the Cornhusker Hotel in Lincoln on the morning of November 25, 1989. Caradori received a message from a man lodging at the Cornhusker—he returned the call and the man requested to meet with Caradori concerning a prospective assignment. Caradori told him that he would be driving from Lincoln to Omaha that morning and consented to stop by the Cornhusker at 8:00 A.M. When Caradori arrived at the hotel, he was directed to a suite. The man answering the suite’s door introduced himself, and then disclosed that he was a Hollywood producer who was working with Casey on a cinematic treatment of the Franklin story. Following their cursory introduction, Casey walked into the room from an adjoining room. Caradori expressed his irritation to Casey over the $300-picture fiasco and brought the meeting to an abrupt conclusion.
Caradori’s contract with the Committee forbade him to discuss the Franklin investigation with publishers and producers, and shortly after his impasse at the Cornhusker, he phoned Committee counsel Berry and explained the circumstances surrounding his “meeting” with the Hollywood producer and Casey. If this had been a typical investigation, Michael Casey would be merely a handful of footnotes in Caradori’s efforts, because Caradori labored incessantly for a year, amassing thousands of leads and interviewing hundreds of individuals. But this wasn’t a typical investigation, and Casey’s role in the “official” account of the affair would significantly eclipse Caradori’s.
On September 22, 1989, a Douglas County judge had imposed a three-to-four-year sentence on the twenty-one-year-old Alisha Owen for two “bad check” convictions: The respective amounts of the two checks were $378.04 and $358.92. A sentence of three to four years for checks totaling $736.96 would only be the beginning of Owen’s bizarre odyssey through the Douglas County judiciary—an odyssey that is perhaps unparalleled in American history.
Casey had met Owen earlier, when both were patients at Omaha’s St. Joseph Hospital’s psychiatric ward. Owen had been admitted for “depression” in September 1988—Casey later boasted to a friend that he feigned a psychiatric illness to cultivate a friendship with Owen at St. Joseph’s. Casey, however, had a long history of alcohol abuse, and individuals who abuse alcohol and other substances frequently opt to dry out in psychiatric hospitals. If Casey had admitted himself to St. Joseph’s solely for the purpose of developing a friendship with Owen, it’s rather odd that he didn’t leave until about a week after Owen’s discharge from St. Joseph’s.
Psychiatric patients who aren’t in the throes of psychosis, like Owen and Casey, have a tendency to congregate, forming bonds that last throughout the course of their hospitalization and perhaps afterward, but Owen contends that her interactions with Casey were limited. Upon her discharge, though, she did give Casey the phone number of her parents’ home in Omaha.
Owen was harboring secrets, and she thought that revealing those secrets would jeopardize the welfare of herself and her family—she was resolved to divulge her secrets to no one, including Casey and St. Joseph’s personnel. But Owen’s secrets were severely straining her emotional well-being, and she attempted suicide two weeks after her psychiatric discharge, landing in St. Joseph’s for a second time.
In addition to being extremely troubled, Owen had a bench warrant pending for bad-check charges. Law enforcement initially requested a hold on Owen, but then inexplicably dropped the arrest warrant, perplexing St. Joseph’s personnel. After Owen’s second discharge from St. Joseph’s, she continued to live at her parents’ house, even though she felt her secrets were imperiling her family.
Casey phoned Owen at her parents’ home following her second hospitalization. He was freeloading at a friend’s house and offered her its vacant studio apartment. She accepted his offer but only slept in the apartment for a handful of nights. Owen quickly concluded that residing in the studio would be potentially hazardous to her health—the homeowner was an associate of Alan Baer, a prominent Omaha millionaire whom Caradori would link to King’s pandering network.
Since Casey initially met Owen at St. Joseph’s, the Franklin Credit Union had been raided and sordid insinuations were surfacing—Casey had taken a budding interest in the Franklin scandal and questioned Owen because of her evident familiarity with Omaha’s gay community. Owen told me that her brief stay with Casey was the first and only time they ever discussed Franklin, emphasizing that she never revealed her involvement to him.
However, she felt grateful to Casey for providing her with shelter and tossed out two names—Troy Boner and Danny King—stating that they were enmeshed in Franklin. Owen felt confident that Casey would never find Boner or King, and she was right: Casey never made contact with either one.
Within two or three weeks of departing Casey’s friend’s digs, Owen and a young man she met at St. Joseph’s would fall in love and flee Nebraska. He wrote a slew of bad checks, purchased a car, and they embarked on a cross-country trek. Their love fest came to a screeching halt in Greeley, Colorado.
They had run out of money and started writing bad checks. The couple then had a domestic spat, and Owen landed in Weld County Jail. As Alisha Owen languished in the Colorado jail, she would be arraigned for six bad checks, totaling $582.63. The twenty-year-old Owen, overwhelmed and demoralized, phoned her parents. Owen’s mother, Donna, then contacted the OPD and informed an officer about her daughter’s circumstances in Colorado, but, to her utter astonishment, the officer phoned a week later and said Nebraska wouldn’t extradite her daughter, even though Colorado had consented to her extradition.
When Owen was released from the Weld County Jail in the middle of May, her parents provided her with a one-way bus ticket to Omaha. Owen chose not to reside at her parents’ home when she arrived in Omaha, perplexing them. She decided to take refuge with a grade school friend—the two had limited contact in recent years, and Owen thought she might have a measure of invisibility at her friend’s. In early July, Owen’s mother received a call from the OPD—she was instructed to transport her daughter to OPD headquarters. Because Nebraska had elected earlier not to extradite Owen, her mother was confounded when Douglas County opted to incarcerate her.
By July 1989, Douglas County’s law enforcement and its judiciary had already started to display a puzzling schizophrenia concerning Owen. When she was hospitalized at St. Joseph’s, law enforcement requested a hold on her because of outstanding warrants but later dropped the hold. In May, Owen’s mother was informed that she wouldn’t be extradited to Nebraska; yet after she voluntarily returned to Omaha, a judge’s directive that gave her the option of making bail was disregarded. Moreover, she would eventually receive three to fours years in the Nebraska Facility for Women at York for bouncing two checks that totaled a whopping $736.96.
Caradori later said that “Alisha Owen” was just one of numerous names he had scribbled on a “scratch pad” while talking with Michael Casey, and he had no idea whether she was a hot lead or a dead end. His Investigative Reports indicate that he initially contacted personnel at the Nebraska Facility for Women at York on October 11, 1989, but nearly three weeks elapsed before he made the trek to York, which illustrates that he consigned Owen to the status of a low priority lead. If Caradori had thought Owen was a surefire lead, he likely would have made a beeline to York.
On Monday, October 30, Caradori and Ormiston arrived at York around 7:00 P.M. Earlier that afternoon, Caradori had phoned the Associate Warden and requested to meet Owen in a location that offered a modicum of privacy, and prison personnel escorted Caradori and Ormiston to a conference room in the prison basement. Their day had been consumed chasing charter-service leads, and they were exhausted.
A pair of guards then ushered Owen into the room, and Caradori and Ormiston introduced themselves to her. Owen stood 5’4” and weighed 150 pounds in her brown state-issued prison garb. She had a thick mane of curly brown hair and hazel eyes. Her rounded face, tentative voice, and mannerisms had the qualities of a timid teenager, even though she had turned twenty-one the month before, and her adolescence had been a detour to her own private hell.
Though Caradori was gracious to Owen, he quickly cut to the chase. She was initially hesitant to discuss her past, but Caradori and Ormiston conveyed an integrity that allayed her suspicions and fears. Over the course of the next three hours, she confessed to her involvement in illicit acts, and specified perpetrators whose names had repeatedly surfaced throughout Caradori’s investigation. At the conclusion of the interview, Caradori asked Owen if she would be willing to make a formal statement the following week. Owen said she needed to sound out her parents, because she felt that her cooperation would potentially endanger members of her family.
After Owen discussed her past with Caradori and Ormiston on Monday night, she was plagued by nightmares for two nights. On Wednesday, she requested a psychiatric consult—she felt that patient confidentiality statutes permitted her to safely disclose her Franklin participation to the prison’s psychiatrist. When she entered the psychiatrist’s office, she insisted that he turn off his tape recorder and not take notes. Once he acquiesced to her requests, and assured her of his confidentiality, she opened up. The psychiatrist, taken aback, insisted that Owen discuss her situation with the warden. Owen subsequently set out for the warden’s office, and, after the warden granted her the same assurances as the psychiatrist, she told him about her history and her dilemma of whether or not she should grant Caradori a formal interview.
A memo from York’s warden to the Nebraska Attorney General’s Office corroborated Owen’s account of her visit to the prison’s psychiatrist and then to the warden. The warden wrote that on the morning of November 1, 1989, he was “advised” by York’s psychiatrist that he “needed” to talk to inmate Owen. The warden inquired about the nature of the psychiatrist’s concerns, but he wouldn’t disclose the content of their conversation.
Owen, the warden continued, explained to him “she had been a witness and victim of child abuse and numerous other illegal activities by … suspects in the Franklin Credit Union investigation.” Owen told the warden that the suspects in the investigation had “considerable power and influence,” and she had anxiety about her safety at the prison—she also said their authority might “extend into the prison and possibly affect” the warden. The warden assured Owen that he was “not at all inclined to be receptive to bribes,” and he noted that Owen “seemed to be accepting of that sentiment and expressed relief that she had talked with me about her problems.”
Later in the week, Owen’s mother and father visited her at York—Owen and her mother then took a walk in the prison’s yard. Owen told her mother that she was personally mixed up in sordid events now coming to light. Her mother inquired if she had direct knowledge of child abuse, and she replied that she had been one of the abused. Though Owen’s mother was dumbfounded by her daughter’s disclosures, she finally had an explanation of her daughter’s peculiar behavior, starting at the age of fourteen. As Owen and her mother cried, her mother asked her daughter why she hadn’t come to her parents for help. Owen said that even though the perpetrators were too powerful for her parents to challenge, she knew they would never have backed down—she was convinced her parents would have been murdered.
Alisha Owen phoned Caradori on November 4 and consented to be interviewed. Caradori copied a myriad of pictures, including those of the alleged perpetrators, and a lawyer from Berry’s law firm drafted a “waiver” to be signed by Owen and Caradori and notarized by Ormiston, a notary public. The waiver clearly stated that Owen’s statements were made freely and voluntarily without promises or threats. Moreover, she was under oath during her statement and would be subject to prosecution for perjured statements. The waiver also denoted that Caradori did not have the authority to grant immunity. On the morning of November 7, Caradori and Ormiston arrived at York and started videotaping Owen’s statement around 11:30 A.M. After a series of respites and breaks, they finished at 10:00 P.M.
Owen came from a deeply religious family. Her parents, Al and Donna, had been married nearly twenty-five years, and Al was the proprietor of a modest construction company. Al and Donna had four kids—Alisha was the second oldest. Owen’s parents enrolled her in a strict parochial school which she attended from kindergarten through sixth grade—she entered public school in seventh grade. At the age of thirteen or so Owen started developing a rebellious streak. It’s not uncommon for teenagers from religious homes to rebel and run with the “wrong crowd,” but unfortunately Owen wasn’t streetwise enough to distinguish the wrong crowd from an evil horde.
Owen told Caradori and Ormiston that she was fourteen years old when she allegedly met a group of Boys Town students, including Jeff Hubbell, at an outdoor dance in August of 1983—Hubbell invited Owen to a party the following Friday night. She said Hubbell declared that the party would be a flood of alcohol and a blizzard of cocaine. On Friday night, Hubbell and a “friend” picked up Owen and drove her to the Twin Towers. They arrived at the party between 9:30 P.M. and 10:00 P.M.
The Twin Towers apartment and the party were a world removed from Owen’s working-class background and prior life experiences. The living room had a fully stocked bar, plush furniture, and a big screen television—a pornographic movie, featuring two adolescent males, spilled from the television. Lines of cocaine were splayed on a mirrored table next to a maroon couch, and the living room’s large windows offered a spectacular nightscape of downtown Omaha. The party consisted of six adults and twenty minors. At the time, Owen said, she didn’t have a clue about the identities of the adults—she would later learn they included Larry King and Alan Baer. She was also introduced to an older man named “Rob.”
Though Owen felt uncomfortable, she also said she felt a sense of exhilaration and sophistication. She did cocaine for the first time and was even allowed to “play bartender”—she became increasingly intoxicated. The adults then watched the minors play the “501 game,” which involved the minors unbuttoning each other’s jeans with their teeth and toes. Owen made it clear to Caradori and Ormiston that she didn’t partake in explicit sexual acts at the first party, even though she observed adults fondling minors and noticed some of the adults and minors shuffling in and out of the bedrooms. Owen didn’t make it home until 1:30 A.M.—her curfew was 12:30 A.M. She received a scolding from her mother but wasn’t grounded.
Over the next three or four days, Owen attempted to sort out her Friday night at the Twin Towers. She had previously fooled around with alcohol here and there, and also fooled around with guys to the point of heavy petting, but the party at the Twin Towers was far afield from her previous acts of rebellion, and she felt conflicted. As Owen struggled to make sense of this new reality, Troy Boner, a boy she met at the party, phoned her and talked about the great time they had.
His call ultimately convinced her to attend her second Twin Towers party the following Friday night. She asked her parents if she could spend Friday night at a girlfriend’s house and they consented—Owen’s parents would later discover that her friend’s mother was very lax about curfews. In addition to King, Baer, and Rob, she said World-Herald columnist Peter Citron attended the party. Owen became extremely intoxicated, drinking champagne and shots of cognac, as the kids played the “501 game.” She stood up and stumbled to the bathroom—she said she accidentally entered one of the bedrooms and saw a pubescent boy performing oral sex on Larry King.
At one point, Owen alleges, Rob asked her to undo his pants zipper with her teeth. Owen balked at Rob’s request, and she was teased and taunted for being a “little girl.” After succumbing to the taunts, she knelt before Rob, who placed a cushion under her knees so she could reach his groin. Owen told Caradori and Ormiston that quiet fell over the room as everyone watched to see if she could unzip Rob’s fly with her teeth. As she managed to unzip Rob’s pants, he ran his fingers through her hair. Owen said that Rob then sat in a chair, holding a glass of cognac, and invited her to sit on his lap. She sat on his lap, and he caressed her breasts and thighs— Owen thought Rob was “really nice.” After Rob left the party, an inebriated Owen lost her virginity to Troy Boner. In retrospect, Owen thought she was “supposed” to lose her virginity that night so she would then be sexually accessible to the group.
Owen told Caradori and Ormiston that she attended her third party at the Twin Towers three weeks later, and Rob showed up about an hour after she arrived—she felt that Rob had probably been called when she arrived. The gathering that night was sparse—adults and kids trickled into the bedrooms, leaving Owen and Rob alone in the living room. Owen was wearing a leather jumpsuit that was “ten years too old” for her, and Rob maneuvered her onto his lap. He said that she was pretty and indicated to Owen that he knew she had lost her virginity; he felt her breasts and genitalia. Rob asked Owen if her parents knew she was no longer a virgin—she felt mortified by his question because she thought that he might tell her parents about her promiscuity.
Owen said that Rob started unzipping her jumpsuit, and she implored him to stop, but he clenched her wrist and twisted it. As Rob removed her clothing, he continued talking—he whispered that she had a “pretty” mouth and then inquired if she knew the meaning of “fellatio.” After Rob had her repeatedly say “fellatio,” he said he would teach her the word’s meaning. When she was nude, he stood up, put a cushion under her knees, and told her to unzip his pants. She unzipped his fly, and then he grabbed her head and had her perform oral sex on him—he also pinched her breasts. After the act, she ran to the bathroom, vomited, and began to cry.
She emerged from the bathroom crying, and Rob gave her a gentle hug and expressed to her that he was sorry. As Rob comforted her, he said that he would take her to lunch on Wednesday afternoon. He also instructed her to pick out a dress at the downtown department store owned by Alan Baer on Monday and put it on “hold.” Owen was given a ride home that night by a couple of the party’s attendees, and one stated that Rob was the Chief of the Omaha Police Department—she instantly feared that Rob would tell her parents about their encounter.
As Owen talked about her “relationship” with OPD Chief Robert Wadman to Caradori and Ormiston, she occasionally stared at the floor and also broke down in tears. At one point, she burst out crying and Caradori briefly stopped the interview. When the interview proceeded, Owen said that on the following Monday, after school, she had wandered to Alan Baer’s department store and found a dress that she liked, filled out a receipt, and gave it to the clerk, whom she described as a fifty-year-old woman with glasses and dyed auburn hair. Caradori asked her a number of questions about the dress: She replied that it was a size ten, “black, lace dress” and cost $115.
Owen told Caradori and Ormiston that Wadman picked her up across the street from Central High School on Wednesday at 1:00 P.M. in a brown compact car. He drove her to the chic French Café in downtown Omaha—Owen disclosed that the Café’s owners and hostess frequented King’s parties. She said that the French Café was generally closed in the afternoons, but the hostess guided her and Wadman to one of the Café’s small side rooms. Once they were seated at a table, she said, Wadman handed her a wrapped package that contained the dress she had picked out on Monday, and then they ordered lunch.
Owen ordered a crepe dish that she didn’t like and just picked at it. After lunch, Owen said, Wadman offered to show her the café’s wine cellar, and she followed him through the kitchen and down a stairway to the left—she told Caradori and Ormiston that the basement was “rickety and yucky” and there wasn’t a wine cellar. Owen uttered that she was afraid of being raped—she “tried to think of anything else but what was happening” as she gazed at the basement ceiling’s molding.
Wadman, Owen continued, requested that she put the dress on in front of him. She initially balked at undressing, but he said that she had a beautiful body and she didn’t have to be ashamed. She also felt like a “heel” for not immediately acquiescing to his request, because the dress was so expensive. As she disrobed and started slipping into the dress, she recalled, Wadman caressed her breasts, pulled down his pants and started to masturbate. Owen told Caradori and Ormiston that Wadman wanted to ejaculate on her, but she jumped back—Wadman was incensed that she had recoiled.
Owen said that she attended a Twin Towers party two weeks later and Wadman eventually showed up. She was afraid of him and started to leave, but Larry King’s enforcer, also named Larry, a muscular African American in his early twenties, said, “You’re not leaving!”—Owen didn’t know his last name and called him “Larry the Kid.”
Owen quickly found herself in over her head—she worried about retribution against her family, and she understandably felt she couldn’t turn to the police for help. Larry the Kid and Larry King repeatedly terrorized Owen by threatening her life and the lives of her family members—Larry the Kid occasionally slapped Owen around and raped her. She stressed that her fear of retribution was very real—she had heard of kids who were either sold or murdered. The threats were counterbalanced by financial rewards: Owen regularly received funds as a drug courier.
Owen said she began to meet Wadman on sporadic Wednesday afternoons, engage in group sexual encounters, and also flew with King to Los Angeles and Kansas City to be pandered as an underage prostitute—Owen described extremely sadistic abuse on the out-of-town trips.
Owen also discussed the circumstances of her incarceration with Caradori and Ormiston. Shortly before the Franklin Credit Union was raided, she said, Larry King and Alan Baer insisted that Owen and Boner relocate to California—Owen and Boner had become lovers and were living together. They were now too old to be pandered to King’s pedophilic clientele, and their detailed knowledge of the network posed a significant risk with the potential heat that might follow the Franklin raid.
Boner had Owen write a flurry of checks to feed his cocaine habit, and Baer agreed to cover the checks when they left for California. Owen, however, began to distrust Boner, and she worried that a trip to California might be the pretext for her ending up in a body bag. She decided not to leave Nebraska; so Baer pulled the plug on his financial support, resulting in an avalanche of bounced checks. Her intuition not to trust Boner would prove to be well founded.
Caradori and Ormiston interviewed Owen on two other occasions. After Caradori videotaped Owen for a second time on November 21, he started to search for Troy Boner. On November 24, Caradori located Boner’s mother, who was living in Council Bluffs, Iowa, a short jaunt from Omaha across the Missouri River. She worked nights as a nurse, and Caradori and Ormiston waited until roughly 8:00 P.M. before they knocked on her front door. They introduced themselves, and Boner’s mother eventually invited them into her kitchen, where an hour-long discussion ensued. She said that her son routinely bounced between California and Omaha, and she would contact him on Caradori’s behalf. She also mentioned that she felt her son was “carrying a great weight on his shoulders” that he refused to discuss with her.
Later that night, Caradori met with a confidential informant in Omaha who disclosed the names of Boys Town students who were allegedly involved with Larry King. After their meeting, he drove home to Lincoln, arriving early Sunday morning. At 4:40 A.M., Caracorp’s answering service directed a call from Troy Boner to Caradori’s home. An exhausted Caradori and Boner spoke for nearly an hour. A seemingly paranoid Boner fired questions at Caradori non-stop.
He initially asked if Caradori had any affiliations with law enforcement—Caradori replied that he was employed by the Franklin Committee and that he had no affiliations with state or federal law enforcement. Boner inquired who had informed Caradori about him—Caradori replied that he received the information from an inmate in a correctional facility, but didn’t reveal his source to be Alisha Owen. Boner then divulged to Caradori that he had, in fact, suffered abuse, and it had left him deeply scarred emotionally. Caradori insisted that they not discuss his circumstances over the phone, and Boner consented to meet Caradori at Boner’s mother’s house in Council Bluffs the following night at 6:00 P.M.
Boner called Caradori back approximately ten minutes after their initial conversation. He had phoned the Lincoln Police Department, and the officer fielding his call stated that the department didn’t employ Caradori. Boner said he felt “satisfied” that Caradori wasn’t a cop and, again, consented to their meeting. Boner then phoned Caradori at 8:00 A.M. and indicated they could meet that morning—they agreed to meet at a Denny’s Restaurant in Bellevue, Nebraska at 10:30 A.M.
As Caradori and Ormiston waited for Boner in the Denny’s parking lot, he pulled up in a green Gran Torino that was driven by his mother’s boyfriend. The twenty two-year-old Boner cautiously emerged from the car and shook hands with Caradori and Ormiston. Boner, 6’3”, weighing 200 pounds, wore a patent leather jacket, a T shirt, and designer jeans—his T-shirt had a silk-screen of The Cure’s Love Song album.
Boner was noticeably agitated, and the restaurant was too congested to confer a feeling of privacy, so Caradori suggested one nearby. Boner rode with Caradori and Ormiston, but he had his mother’s boyfriend tail them. His mother’s boyfriend hung out in the parking lot as Boner, Caradori, and Ormiston entered the second restaurant. The three situated themselves around a table and talked in “generalities” for five or ten minutes before Caradori dropped a succession of details that were designed to convey that his information was “on target.” After half an hour, Boner decided to grant Caradori a formal, videotaped statement.
When they departed the restaurant, they proceeded to the home of his mother’s boyfriend, where Boner and his fiancée were living. Boner packed a week’s worth of clothes, and told his fiancée and his mother’s boyfriend that he was accompanying Caradori and Ormiston to Lincoln. Boner’s fiancée seemed to understand the import of his decision, but his mother’s boyfriend was uncomfortable. Caradori pledged that Boner would be safe, and he handed his mother’s boyfriend a business card, assuring him that either he or Boner’s mother could phone him anytime.
Driving to Lincoln, Caradori would find out that Boner and Owen came from very different backgrounds: Boner’s father had spent years in prison for various offenses, and he didn’t have the intact nuclear family of Owen. Though Boner’s father had been absent from the family for years, his mother and grandmother still managed to impart a sense of family to Boner and his siblings. Troy was the oldest of four children.
Caradori, Ormiston, and Boner made the hour trek from Omaha to Lincoln and stopped at a Residence Inn. Caradori left Ormiston and Boner in the hotel room and made a foray to pick up pizza and videotapes. After eating, Ormiston read the waiver prepared by Berry’s law firm—it was then signed by Boner and Caradori and notarized by Ormiston. Caradori and Ormiston interviewed Boner from 3:35 P.M. until 10:22 P.M., taking breaks and respites. The next morning Boner was interviewed for an additional two hours.
During Boner’s videotaped statements, he corroborated Owen’s information on numerous perpetrators and many events. Caradori also noted a number of discrepancies concerning the dates and precise locations of the events they mentioned. Owen had admitted to drug and alcohol abuse during her teenage years, and Boner was a self-confessed drug addict. Caradori felt that their years of incessant sexual abuse and their drug-addled memories made it extremely difficult for them to recall the precise dates and locations of events that had transpired years earlier, whereas the events themselves would have been easier to remember.
Among King’s crew, Troy Boner’s nickname was “Mr. Hollywood” because of his movie-star good looks and fashionably cool persona. But as Caradori started to interview Boner, his cool demeanor began to crack. Caradori’s questions required a degree of introspection, and as Boner was confronted with the horrors of his life, he became increasingly uncomfortable. At certain points in the interview, Boner seemed to look back on the carnage of his life with shock and dismay.
Boner recalled that a friend of his introduced him to Alan Baer in August of 1983. He said he was seventeen years old when he first met Baer, but his date of birth was January 16, 1967; so in actuality he would have been sixteen years old in August of 1983. Boner related that he had a number of paid sexual encounters with Baer at his Twin Towers apartment before meeting Larry King.
Boner said that Baer had given pictures of him (Boner) to King prior to Boner’s initially meeting King at a gay bar. Boner claimed that King, who introduced himself as “Chuck,” approached him and tucked a $100 bill in his shirt pocket. King then took him to dinner, and they drove to a Red Lion Inn—Boner alleged that King performed oral sex on him, and gave him an additional $50.
After their initial sexual encounter, King put up Boner at a Travel Lodge Inn for three weeks. Boner said that King would routinely stop by in the afternoons to have anal sex with him. He also alleged that King was fond of being urinated on. Boner said King eventually provided him with a furnished apartment in Omaha—King regularly visited the apartment to have sex with Boner or for sexual liaisons with other minors.
Boner also spoke about his relationship with Owen: He confessed that he had taken Owen’s virginity and also stated he had introduced her to Chief Wadman, but he recalled that their introduction occurred at a party in the Woodman Tower, rather than the Twin Towers. Boner confirmed Owen’s alleged Wednesday afternoon trysts with Wadman and even named the same hotels that she specified. Boner said that Owen was often threatened and even “slapped around” by one of King’s henchmen to ensure her compliance with Wadman and others in King’s network.
Boner, like Owen, discussed being on interstate flights to be pandered as an underage prostitute and being used as a drug courier. Boner and Owen both mentioned making a joint drug run to Los Angeles on United Airlines for Larry King. Regarding a second drug run, Boner backed Owen’s account, saying they flew to Los Angeles on a commercial flight to make a drug buy for Alan Baer— both Boner and Owen mentioned that they scored “$4,000 worth of cocaine” for him.
Boner, again corroborating Owen’s allegations, discussed a private charter flight to California that included Larry King, Owen, Danny King (no relation to Larry King), two prepubescent boys, and himself. Boner and Owen remembered a stopover in Denver and then flying to Southern California. Owen, who admitted to be being “bombed,” recalled Larry King departing at a “small airport in California” with one of the prepubescent boys as the others proceeded to an airport near Pasadena— Owen speculated that the boy had been either sold or murdered.
Boner, who confessed he was “flying on coke,” told a slightly different tale: Everyone departed the plane at the airport near Pasadena, and he said that Owen and Danny King were picked up by a fat, older white male. He told Caradori and Ormiston that he then accompanied Larry King in a rental car as King dropped off each of the little boys at two different locations. As Caradori questioned Boner about the two little boys, he had great difficulty elaborating—he repeatedly turned his head to the right, sighed loudly, and made a number of nervous gestures. Boner ultimately said he believed the two younger kids had been “sold.”
In Southern California, Boner alleged, Larry King pandered Owen and Danny King to a pair of sadistic pedophiles, again corroborating Owen—she had said that she and Danny King had been served to a couple of sadistic pedophiles in Pasadena. Boner related that he and Larry King picked up Owen and Danny King following their nightmarish ordeal. According to Boner, Owen “looked and smelled” terrible and Danny King wanted to “go back and kill the guy.” On the return flight to Omaha, Owen refused to talk to him. Boner said he felt like reporting Larry King after the trip, but he was afraid to contact law enforcement.
Boner also described taking commercial flights to Los Angeles: On one Los Angeles trip, he said, King arranged for him to have a tryst with a prominent producer, whose name he mentioned. On a second trip to Los Angeles, he was driven to the Hollywood home of a man named “Henry,” who tied him up and played various “sexual games” with him. In addition, Boner discussed extremely sadistic child-sex orgies that corresponded to the sadistic abuse endured by Owen. He talked about a party at the Woodman Tower, and alleged that he was forced to have oral sex with his “best friend” Danny King and that Larry King then had anal sex with him and put out a cigarette on his buttocks.
Boner confessed to Caradori that he had trepidations about returning to the Omaha area, so Caradori rented a small apartment in Lincoln for him. Caradori later said that Boner was accustomed to living the high life, even though his mindset often resembled that of a confused adolescent. Boner boasted of $1,000 suits and $500 shoes, but he had never washed his own clothes. When Caradori took Boner out to eat, Caradori typically ordered a cheeseburger; Boner would order a T-bone steak.
After Boner’s second interview, Caradori visited Berry’s office later that morning to give him an update—Berry told Caradori to stick around because Senator Schmit wanted to talk to him. When Schmit arrived, he expressed his concerns to Caradori and Berry about the FBI starting to scrutinize his businesses. They also discussed whether or not they should “go public” with Caradori’s evidence or proceed directly to Washington, DC, because they felt that influential agencies of both state and federal law enforcement in Nebraska were corrupt and antagonistic to their objectives. Caradori’s Investigative Report recorded that the meeting yielded only uncertainty regarding their next move.
The next day, Caradori and Boner drove to Omaha and proceeded to Danny King’s apartment. Boner knocked on the front door as Caradori stood next to him. Danny King let Boner into the apartment, and Boner briefly explained Caradori’s intentions to King—Caradori noted that Boner and Danny King were alone for “two minutes” before he entered the residence. Both the apartment and King were in a state of disarray. King was admittedly recovering from an LSD spree, and the sudden arrival of Boner and then Caradori had shocked him like a stun gun—he was paranoid and frightened.
The twenty-year-old King—short, frail, and skinny—had a blanched, boyish face, and, because of a congenital throat condition, he spoke in a guttural rasp. Danny King had a single, nomadic mother, and he grew up as a wild child with very little supervision, whereas Owen came from an intact nuclear family and Boner came from a semi-intact family. King also lacked the native intelligence and even nominal self-esteem of Owen and Boner.
King was unemployed and in the process of being evicted—Caradori had him pack up all of his belongings, which fit into a bulging vinyl suitcase. As the three climbed into Caradori’s car, King started volunteering details about his abuse, but Caradori politely asked him to refrain from discussing the subject. During the drive back to Lincoln, King sat silently in the front seat, and Boner, sitting in the back seat, occasionally reassured him: “Everything is going to be alright. Nobody is going to hurt us anymore….”
Caradori, Boner and King arrived at the offices of Caracorp at approximately 11:30 P.M. Caradori then “indicated” that Boner should return to his apartment, a few blocks from Caracorp. Before Caradori drove King to the Residence Inn, he asked Boner if he and King had discussed any details of their experiences during that day, and Boner replied that they hadn’t. King then asked Boner, “Did you tell them everything?” and Boner responded, “Yes, I told them everything.”
Caradori met Ormiston at the Residence Inn the following morning. After breakfast with Danny King, they proceeded to King’s room. As King seated himself in front of the video camera, he became visibly frightened and agitated. He told Caradori and Ormiston that the statements of Owen and Boner were fabricated, and he wanted to leave. Caradori talked to King, attempting to assuage his concerns, and King confessed that he was afraid of retribution, disclosing that he had been threatened just three and a half weeks earlier. After King’s acute fears abated and he relaxed, Ormiston read the waiver, and it was then signed by King and Caradori and notarized by Ormiston.
King said Boner initially introduced him to Alan Baer in the fall of 1983, when he was fourteen years old—he maintained that he accompanied Boner to Baer’s Twin Towers apartment, and the three drank schnapps. King claimed that he didn’t have sex with Baer at their first meeting—Boner also said that Danny King and Baer didn’t have sex on that occasion. King disclosed that he took the bus to Baer’s Twin Towers apartment approximately two weeks later. He and Baer again knocked back schnapps, and Baer performed oral sex on Danny King—afterward Baer gave him fifty dollars. King said he then started having sexual liaisons with Baer on a weekly basis.
Danny King recalled meeting Larry King at Baer’s apartment around April 1984, when Larry King took him into Baer’s bedroom and allegedly had anal sex with him. Danny King said that he pleaded with Larry King to stop, since it was hurting him; so Larry King had Danny King perform oral sex on him. Danny King spit out Larry King’s semen, he said, prompting Larry King to smack him on the side of the head with his shoe. Danny King also discussed the party at Woodman Tower where Larry King forced him and Boner to have sex together, corroborating Boner.
Danny King, Troy Boner, and Alisha Owen all reported accompanying Larry King and the two little boys on a private flight to Southern California. But Danny King remembered being delivered to a party at a house where he was required to perform oral sex on a man, instead of the hotel mentioned by Owen. King corroborated Owen on a flight to Kansas City, even though his description of the events differed slightly from Owen’s. He confirmed that Larry King delivered him and Owen to a hotel with a waterfall. Danny King described three men initially showing up at their room, and Owen said a third man turned up later. A second discrepancy noted by Caradori was that Owen said one man molested her and two men molested King, whereas King claimed that two men molested Owen and one man molested him. Danny King also corroborated Owen’s claim that Larry King’s primary henchman was named Larry.
Caradori noted that Danny King was very disoriented and had difficulties remembering that January followed December—I would eventually locate Danny King, and I, too, would find him extremely confused, befuddled, and possessed of a flawed recollection on even relatively straightforward events.
Caradori videotaped Danny King for approximately six hours with periodic breaks, and then drove him to the apartment he rented for Boner. Caradori was a meticulous investigator, and he realized the importance of corroborating their videotaped statements. So he spent the next two days shuttling King to Omaha and Council Bluffs to identify the numerous locations he had mentioned throughout his statement. As Caradori and King navigated a major Omaha thoroughfare, King identified the Twin Towers and pinpointed Baer’s apartment balcony. Caradori also had an associate shuttle Boner to Omaha and Council Bluffs for the same purpose— they subsequently photographed the locations named by Boner and Danny King. After accruing scores of photos, Caradori had Boner and King separately identify them, and they consistently corroborated each other on the photographed locations.
Interestingly, the allegations of Owen and Danny King corroborated Shawneta Moore on one perpetrator, even though they had never met her. Moore had told Irl Carmean that an administrator for the Fort Calhoun school system accompanied Larry King to one of the child-sex parties she attended, and both Owen and Danny King identified the same individual as frequenting King’s sex parties. Moreover, Owen, Boner, and Danny King corroborated Eulice Washington on the chartered flights. Owen and Boner also corroborated Washington on the entanglement of Boys Town’s students in King’s pandering network.
By mid-December of 1989, Caradori had accrued approximately twenty-one hours of victim testimony from Owen, Boner, and King. His Investigative Reports noted that the evidence he was amassing had begun to create dissonance between him and the Committee and also spark confusion within the Committee itself. As the Committee members were confronted with Caradori’s mounting evidence, they became increasingly perplexed about where to turn because of their distrust of state and federal law enforcement. Unrequited overtures to the US Attorney General’s Office further confounded the Committee members. Caradori’s Investigative Reports also indicated that he was extremely concerned for the welfare of Owen, Boner, and King. In addition to renting an apartment for Boner and King, he purchased food and various toiletry articles for them.
In a letter to Berry, he acknowledged that the victims he videotaped represented a “small portion” of the case, but he felt that the Committee had a responsibility to look out for their welfare. He requested that they receive physicals, counseling, and “secured living arrangements.” Caradori mentioned that Owen was particularly vulnerable and emphasized that her cooperation should not be made public until she was in a safe environment that met both the needs of the Committee and also her obligations to the State of Nebraska. He stressed that the victims had never communicated their experiences before, and, therefore, he had established a trusting bond with them that needed to be nurtured and free of “surprises.” Caradori concluded the letter by stating that his “requests may seem unusual,” but the financial resources of the perpetrators and the “possible political ramifications” made it necessary for the Committee’s moves to be “cautious, well planned, and expedient.”
Caradori’s investigation was quickly sideswiped by one of the surprises he had feared in his letter to Committee counsel Berry. Two NSP investigators made a visit to Owen at York on December 15, and their visit elicited an alarming phone call from her. Caradori immediately phoned York’s warden, who confirmed that two NSP investigators had interviewed Owen throughout the afternoon. After Caradori spoke to both Schmit and Berry, he drove to York that night, but he arrived too late in the evening for York personnel to grant him entry into the prison.
Caradori drove to York again the following day and talked to Owen. She said that the investigators had arrived at York in the morning, conspicuously ate lunch in the cafeteria with the inmates, and then interviewed Owen in the warden’s office. According to Owen, the NSP investigators were menacing to her, and they degraded Caradori. She told Caradori the investigators declared that the Franklin Committee didn’t exist.
Caradori checked the prison’s logs and noticed that two NSP investigators signed in at 9:29 A.M. and signed out at 3:15 P.M. The Committee had yet to hand over the videotaped statements of the victims to state and federal law enforcement; Caradori surmised that Owen’s whereabouts had been gleaned through wiretaps. For Caradori, the NSP’s sandbagging of Owen would be merely the first of many “surprises.”
Caradori feared that the NSP investigators’ salient presence at York and their interrogation of Owen in the warden’s office would set off rumors of her being a jailhouse snitch—six weeks later three inmates attacked her in the prison’s shower room. The State Ombudsman’s Office, which investigates citizens’ complaints against state administrative agencies, conducted an inquiry into the assault on Owen, and it concluded that the attack “was motivated, in part, because some of her fellow inmates thought that she might be an informant against the women at York.”
The Ombudsman investigators wrote the following about Owen: “We did not find, in our dealings with her in this matter, that she engaged in any exaggeration or magnification of the facts; nor did we detect any attempt on her part to stretch the truth or to falsely color the facts surrounding the assault upon her.” Shortly after the assault, Owen was placed in “24 hour lock up” segregation for her own “protection”—she would remain in solitary for nearly two years.
Three days after the NSP investigators harassed Owen at York, the Committee held a press conference in Lincoln, announcing that it would hand over its twenty-one hours of videotaped testimony to Nebraska’s Attorney General and the US Attorney for Nebraska. The Committee also publicized a letter that would accompany the tapes. The Lincoln Journal quoted Berry commenting on the letter: “Our letter was to show that we’re keeping a lot of options open,” he said. “The fact of turning this information over is not our swan song. We’re not removing ourselves from the quest.”
The letter itself stated, “It is the opinion of committee members that the activities described and the personalities involved scream out for action whether the statute of limitations problems are involved or not.” The letter also alluded to the possibility of others covering up crimes: “The members of the committee are dismayed by the fact that no state or federal investigative bodies interviewed any of the witnesses we have, even though they were discovered by our investigative efforts after a fairly short time and with a very small budget.”
Perhaps Attorney General Robert Spire forgot that his office initially refused to honor the Committee’s subpoenas when he responded to the letter: “There has been a high degree of cooperation all along between the Franklin Committee and the Attorney General’s Office, and I’m sure that will continue.” Spire then criticized the Committee for implying a cover-up and defended the efforts of state and federal law enforcement. “The letter in effect is saying that the FBI and State Patrol have not done a good job,” he said. “I do not think that’s fair…. They’ve been very thorough.” He then promised that the State Patrol would “get right on it.” He neglected to mention that the NSP had jumped “right on it” three days earlier, harassing Owen at York.[Lying sack of s%*t DC]
After the Committee held its press conference, it directed Caradori to condense the statements of Alisha Owen, Troy Boner, and Danny King into a five-hour video, which it showed to select officials within Nebraska’s judiciary and law enforcement on December 19. The officials included Assistant Attorney General William Howland, an NSP official from their Criminal Division, the Sheriffs of Douglas and Butler counties, and a Douglas County judge. The Committee hoped to marshal support from the officials before surrendering the tapes to state and federal law enforcement. The Sheriff of Douglas County would, in fact, tell the Lincoln Journal-Star that he found the victims’ testimony on the videotapes to be credible.
The Committee submitted its twenty-one hours of videotaped statements to the offices of Nebraska’s Attorney General and the US Attorney on December 27, 1989. Spire and US Attorney Ronald Lahners were now forced to act—the toothpaste had managed to squirt out of the tube. They no longer had the luxury of defaulting to the canard that the child-abuse allegations didn’t “bear up.” In addition to pledging immediate action by the NSP, Spire called upon the Douglas County judges to impanel a grand jury to probe the child-abuse allegations.
Caradori had strong misgivings when the Committee relinquished its videotaped statements to state and federal law enforcement: His primary concerns were FBI or NSP harassment of victims, as Owen had already endured, and also leaks to the press. He realized that Owen, Boner, and Danny King were fragile, and he felt that heat from the FBI or NSP would melt their cooperation. Moreover, his videotaped statements contained the names of several additional victims who would be subjected to harassment before he even had an opportunity to contact them— Caradori had made contact with several victims who refused to talk to him for fear of publicity and reprisal.
Ironically, the first media onslaught that staggered Caradori’s investigation wouldn’t be incited by law enforcement but, rather, by a memo from John DeCamp.
On January 18, 1990, DeCamp sent a memo to reporters at the World-Herald and Lincoln Journal, stating that the public “is rapidly losing faith in its fundamental institutions of government” because of the way law enforcement entities have conducted their investigations into the allegations. The “DeCamp Memo” then listed Larry King and four other prominent Nebraskans as the “centerpieces in a coordinated program of child abuse.” DeCamp insisted that the names in his memo weren’t garnered through the Committee, nor had he watched Caradori’s videotapes: He claimed the five names were a ubiquitous buzz in Omaha bars and coffee shops and on the city’s street corners, even though the names had been “quietly and carefully” covered up by the press.
“A reporter,” the memo declared, “has to be deaf, dumb, blind, and corrupt not to know the names of the personalities involved and the scope of the allegations.” In addition to alleging a media cover-up, DeCamp threw down a challenge to the press: “Now when the personalities are the most powerful media people in the state —who hold the ability to destroy your reporting careers—let’s see the same press coverage and exposure and investigative reporting that you are capable of when dealing with the lesser people of the state.” Moreover, DeCamp challenged the five prominent individuals to sue him: “No, I do not fear a lawsuit. I fear just like any alleged child victims in this bizarre tragedy, that the rich and the powerful will use their positions of power and control of institutions of government to shut up those who would speak out and bring things to a head.”
The World-Herald and Lincoln Journal reported on the “DeCamp Memo,” but neither newspaper identified the alleged perpetrators named by DeCamp. Instead, each paper published a collage of quotes dispensed by Committee members excoriating DeCamp for disclosing the names. Though Nebraska newspapers declined to report on the names cited by DeCamp, an Omaha radio personality allowed a caller to recite the names mentioned in the memo—she was fired shortly thereafter. A candidate for the Nebraska legislature also mailed 10,000 copies of the memo to registered voters in his Omaha district.
According to DeCamp, two events triggered his memo: a personal interaction with Nick O’Hara, special agent in charge of the FBI’s Omaha Field Office, and an article in the Lincoln Journal. In the spring of 1989, before the Committee had hired Caradori, they were frustrated by the seeming inactivity of the OPD and NSP to investigate the child-abuse allegations, and they had concerns about OPD Chief Wadman. So Schmit turned to his personal attorney, John DeCamp, for legal advice, and DeCamp suggested that Schmit approach Nick O’Hara—DeCamp accompanied Schmit to the Omaha FBI, where Schmit initially had a one-on-one with O’Hara. After Schmit and O’Hara conversed for an hour, DeCamp joined them, and, he said, O’Hara discharged a grave warning to both Schmit and DeCamp: He contended that anyone who cast aspersions on Wadman’s character would be subjected to the wrath of the FBI.[Like I said gestapo DC]
The second event was motivated by professional self-preservation: A Lincoln Journal article, “Franklin Witness Says DeCamp Offered to Help in Suing State, Police,” reported that DeCamp had volunteered to represent Shawneta Moore, whom it quoted: “He wants to sue the police department and the state for, like, negligence.” DeCamp explicitly told the Lincoln Journal reporter that Moore had originally phoned him, but the article implied that he had initiated the contact. The Lincoln Journal article also alluded to DeCamp having “inside information” about the Franklin investigation, and it provoked a hostile inquiry from a World-Herald reporter who questioned DeCamp concerning his Franklin sources. DeCamp felt that his memo to the Lincoln Journal and World-Herald would prevent future distortions about his knowledge of events and where he had acquired that knowledge.
Moore ultimately opted not to retain DeCamp, but a week after the article appeared the Nebraska Bar Association informed DeCamp that his license to practice law was “under investigation” because he “may have attempted to solicit legal business.” DeCamp responded to the Bar complaint with an affidavit from a friend of Moore’s whom he had previously represented, stating that she suggested Moore contact DeCamp, and affidavits from two secretaries confirming that Moore had initiated the contact. The Nebraska Bar would ultimately clear DeCamp of any improprieties.
The DeCamp Memo had a seismic impact on the Nebraska airwaves, and its aftershocks were even felt outside of Nebraska: The Kansas City Star reported on the memo, and it received a minor blurb in Newsweek. Gary Caradori, however, became increasingly agitated about the memo, because the media frenzy it incited created an unfavorable ripple effect for his investigation—he found it more and more difficult to coax victims and others who had information to come forward.
The collective reverberations of DeCamp’s memo, Caradori’s investigation, and the impending Douglas County grand jury coincided with a pair of major “surprises.” The first occurred when President George H.W. Bush rolled into town—Bush would speak at a February 7, 1990, fundraiser for Governor Orr, a fellow Republican. Larry King considered the president a personal “friend” and proudly displayed a picture of himself and Bush, looking like the best of friends, at the Franklin Credit Union. You will recall that King hosted a $100,000 gala for the newly-nominated Bush at the 1988 Republican Convention in New Orleans.
A source informed Caradori that King had purchased a ticket to attend the “$1,000- a-couple” fundraiser, even though the event’s organizers later denied it. The source also disclosed to Caradori that when the Secret Service discovered King’s plan to grace the fundraiser, they either ushered him to the federal courthouse or demanded that he make haste thereto. Either way, King made an impromptu appearance at the federal courthouse in the early afternoon of February 7, before US Magistrate Richard Kopf. (In the US federal court system, a magistrate judge is a judge appointed to assist a US District Court judge in the performance of his or her duties. Magistrate judges serve terms of eight years if full-time, or four years if part-time, and may be reappointed. They conduct a wide range of judicial proceedings to expedite the disposition of cases in United States District Courts.)
Magistrate Kopf ordered King to undergo a “mental health evaluation” at the US Medical Center for Federal Prisoners in Springfield, Missouri—”with no delay.” King waived a hearing on Kopf’s ruling and immediately found himself en route to Springfield in the custody of two US marshals. Kopf’s preemptive decision on King’s “mental health,” made without a motion from anyone, was extremely odd, but the magistrate didn’t feel inclined to defend his ruling. When questioned about his decree, Kopf stated, “The decision speaks for itself!”
The outspoken Senator Chambers, who had resigned from the Committee the previous July, chimed in on King’s sudden psychiatric woes. In a World-Herald article, Chambers is quoted as having “reason to believe” King planned to attend the fundraiser. “Powerful people at the national level,” Chambers surmised, “have more to gain by Larry King being eliminated than standing trial, people of sufficient power to cause him to be sent to Springfield in the first place.” Chambers quipped that he would elaborate on his allegations if King “should die or his mind should be destroyed.” Senator Schmit wasn’t buying King’s mental maladies either—he said that he was “very suspicious” about the circumstances surrounding King’s mentalhealth exodus.
Meanwhile, personnel at the Springfield medical facility were evidently taking King’s newfound “condition” rather seriously. An administrator at Springfield assured the Lincoln Journal that King’s mental health evaluation commenced “the minute he walked through the door.” The administrator mentioned that the evaluation would include assessments by psychiatrists and psychologists, including a battery of mental-health tests.
Though Springfield personnel were purportedly determined to probe the depths of Larry King’s psyche, his friends and family were left scratching their heads about this unexpected turn of events. King had ostensibly found employment with an Omaha florist as he awaited his upcoming trial, and the owner of the floral shop told the Lincoln Journal that King hadn’t shown any signs of mental problems, nor had he undergone abrupt behavioral changes—he even said that King was an above average employee. King’s pastor concurred with the employer. “He is a man under stress and is coping with it the best he can,” said the pastor. “I thought under the circumstances he was doing pretty well.” In a World-Herald interview, King’s pastor speculated that he would be surprised if King was found to be psychologically unsound: “I didn’t see any indications of mental problems.” [Now you folks watch CLOSELY this will be the same path they take with Epstein,in order to keep him from a trial if they cannot suicide him DC]
But Springfield’s chief psychiatrist disagreed and diagnosed King with a “probable delusional paranoid disorder, grandiose type.” King was returned to Omaha on March 18, and roughly two weeks later he was again marched before Magistrate Kopf. Kopf embraced the diagnosis of Springfield’s chief psychiatrist and ruled that King’s “intellectual system of grandiosity leads to disorganization of thought processes which gravely impairs the ability of Mr. King to withstand a lengthy trial.” In other words, he declared King unfit for trial—he also sealed his psychiatric report. [So it will be this route for Epstein OR, the O.J. route,which I hardly doubt,but who knows given what the pond scum thinks about how stupid Americans are DC]
US District Judge William Cambridge, who was slated to be King’s trial judge for his financial charges, adopted Kopf’s findings and recommendations and found King incompetent to stand trial. He ordered that King be taken “forthwith” to the US Medical Facility in Rochester, Minnesota. Cambridge instructed Rochester personnel to determine if King had the “capacity to permit the trial to proceed” in the foreseeable future. US Attorney Lahners didn’t object to Cambridge’s maneuver and actually seemed rather pleased by this chain of events because of his foremost concern for King’s mental health. “It’s in the best interest of the defendant to get back into treatment,” remarked Lahners. Kopf’s bizarre and preemptive whisking of King to Springfield, Cambridge’s cosigning Kopf’s ruling, and Lahner’s kowtowing ensured that King would be safely tucked away from both wayward subpoenas and the press.[The reader needs to remember something as he or she reads,this trial they are talking about had NOTHING to do with child abuse,this trial concerned the missing money from Franklin! Now you ask yourself since this stunt with King how many other thieves have been declared unfit for trial because of so called mental health? Off hand, I cannot think of one,any reminders by a reader are welcome DC]
King’s extraordinary treatment by the federal judiciary begs a rather troubling question: Were federal judges bending over backwards to provide a legal sanctuary for an alleged child molester?
King would have a five-month sabbatical in Minnesota as a “pretrial detainee.” The US Medical Facility in Rochester is considered to be the “Club Fed” in the federal prison system, and King’s stay at Rochester would overlap with those of evangelical charlatan Jim Baker, political agitator Lyndon LaRouche, and Joey Aiuppa, the former capo of the Chicago mafia. I interviewed a former federal prisoner who served time at Rochester with King—he told me that King didn’t display the slightest signs of mental instability. He also said that Rochester’s other high-profile criminals made an effort to steer clear of him.
While psychiatrists in Springfield were diagnosing King as “delusional,” Omaha World-Herald columnist Peter Citron would be at the epicenter of a second surprise.
At approximately 6:00 P.M. on February 22, 1990, OPD officers converged on the fifty-year-old Citron at Omaha’s Ak-Sar-Ben horse track, and he was arrested for the felonious sexual assault of two children. Citron’s charges stemmed from his sexual molestation of two boys, ages 11 and 13, who lived in his neighborhood and did “chores” for him. The “rumors” of Citron’s perversity had wafted to the mother of one of the boys, and she asked her son if Citron had acted inappropriately with him. The boy confessed to Citron’s abuse, and his mother phoned the OPD—her son also knew of a second boy who had been molested by Citron.
On the night of Citron’s arrest, the OPD executed a search warrant at his home. The OPD officers who raided Citron’s house found a sordid assortment of 8-millimeter films, videos, pictures, and magazines. Citron’s prized kiddy porn collection included the following magazines:Young Boys & Masturbation; Chicken Little; Naked Boyhood; Boyland; Young and Ready; Boy Heat; Like Young; Young Boys and Fellatio; Teenage Masturbation; Young Boys and Sex Play; Oh Boy; Kids; Naked Boyhood; Boys, Boys, Boys; and Young Boys and Sodomy.
Citron spent the night in jail, and the next day he and his lawyer, James Martin Davis, appeared in Douglas County District Court. Standing before the judge in a rumpled sports shirt, blue jeans, and loafers, the diminutive Citron entered a plea of “not guilty” to the charges. Douglas County Deputy Attorney Bob Sigler requested that the judge forgo requiring Citron to post bail, and he skipped out of the courthouse without coughing up a penny or saying a word to a swarm of reporters.
Though Citron didn’t feel inclined to talk, his attorney wasn’t shying away from the press. Davis emphasized that the charges against Citron weren’t Franklin-related, but he said he would have to withdraw from Citron’s case due to the fact that he had previously advised Senator Schmit on the Committee’s investigative direction. Davis then gave an impassioned soliloquy on how “Omaha is going to be the first city to gossip itself to death” as he condemned the city’s rampant rumor-mongering: “We’re suffering here in Omaha under a firestorm of suspicion, and we have hurricane-force rumors. Peter Citron and so many others are suffering as a result of that.” [Typical piece of s*%t defense attorney concerned about his pockets instead of true justice DC]
The viewpoint that Peter Citron’s “suffering” would be the byproduct of rumors is a bit peculiar, especially after he was arrested for molesting two children, but the World-Herald seemed to sprinkle sympathy on Citron too. In an article published two days after his arrest, “Citron: Rumors Have Ruined Journalism Career in Omaha,” the World-Herald reported that an indignant Citron felt that “the rumors about his involvement in Franklin” had destroyed his career, even though the World-Herald had suspended him only after his arrest. Citron also thoroughly denied his purported association with Franklin. “If I have any connection with the Franklin case,” said Citron, “so does anyone who’s ever eaten at a Larry King restaurant, because that’s the only connection I’ve had with him.” Citron maintained that he had three interactions with King—“twice in person and once by phone,” and only in the capacity of a journalist.
Within days of Citron’s arrest, the Committee requested that Douglas County law enforcement provide the Committee with the evidence it had collected from its investigation of Citron. But Douglas County Attorney Ronald Staskiewicz refused to assist the Committee—he contended that imparting information to the Committee would “jeopardize” the Douglas County investigation of Citron and also the upcoming “grand jury investigation.” Schmit responded by saying that he considered Citron to be a “small fry” in the Franklin hierarchy of perpetrators, and he was annoyed by law enforcement’s chasing of “straw men.”
Citron would be allowed to plead “no contest” to two counts of felony child molestation. His lawyer said the plea meant “we do not wish to contest the charges, and we do not admit to the charges.” The cover story for Citron opting to plead no contest was that he decided not to subject himself and the two boys to the trauma of trial. But under the terms of Citron’s plea agreement, he would be absolved of additional charges stemming from the OPD’s seizure of his cache of child pornography. So, ultimately, Citron never had to face the music for his kiddy porn collection. In addition to the magazines, Citron had a considerable ensemble of Polaroid pictures, videos, and 8-millimeter films. Citron’s two counts of child molestation each carried a maximum penalty of five years in prison and a $10,000 fine; but if he were charged on the many counts of child pornography that his colossal collection of kiddy porn potentially entailed, he would have been staring at decades in prison.
Following his plea of no contest, Citron was sentenced to between three and eight years in prison for two counts of child molestation. The sentencing judge said that Citron was a “convicted child molester with repeat offenses over the past twenty five years.” Though Citron had never been charged with child abuse during his years in Omaha, he had been charged with molestation twenty-five years earlier in his native New York. Moreover, additional victims of Citron stepped forward after his arrest. But the statute of limitations had expired on their alleged abuses, and Citron skated on those charges too.
Shortly after Citron’s arrest, a police spokesman said that the OPD and the Douglas County Attorney were the only “agencies” involved in investigating the molestation charges leveled against Citron. However, an NSP memo dated the day of Citron’s arrest referred to a prior FBI memo, which stated that US Postal Inspectors had the name and address of Peter Citron on a list “of individuals who are known to have received child pornographic material.” Thus, Citron had a history of child molestation, his name turned up on a list of individuals receiving kiddy porn through the mail, but federal and state law enforcement had ignored him until his name surfaced in connection with Franklin, and they nonetheless vowed that Citron was not actually connected to the scandal.[Yeah and the sky is green DC]
Though Douglas County Attorney Ronald Staskiewicz and Assistant Douglas County Attorney Bob Sigler continued to insist the charges against Citron weren’t Franklin-related, they never allowed the Committee to scrutinize the evidence impounded from Citron’s home—even after he was sentenced and the state’s grand jury had been dismissed. In fact, Citron’s profuse stock of kiddy porn would be conveniently sealed when he was sentenced.
By the time of the arrest, Gary Caradori had been on Citron’s heels for quite some time. Caradori wrote a letter to Citron on January 31, 1990, requesting an interview, and his Investigative Report on the day of Citron’s arrest stated, “It is my opinion now that Peter Citron could be a very helpful reference in this case if the proper arrangements were made.” Besides street buzz linking Citron and King as perpetrators, Owen said that she had seen Citron at a Twin Towers sex party. Moreover, Caradori would videotape a fourth victim in May, who also linked Citron to the Twin Towers sex parties.
I also possess interviews conducted by Caradori where Citron’s name springs up. In the first interview, Caradori questioned a “confidential informant” who did consulting for King and the Franklin Credit Union—she remarked that she and King had a meeting in his office where King specifically instructed his secretary “to get Citron on the phone.” The second interview was with a Nebraska Department of Social Services supervisor. Caradori asked him about Citron, and he replied that it was common to see Citron in the company of “little boys.” Caradori inquired why nobody in Social Services scrutinized Citron’s activities—the interviewee responded that it wasn’t his “responsibility.” Caradori then pressed him for an explanation for Social Services’ steering clear of Citron, and he responded, “I don’t have a good answer for that.”
In a third interview, Caradori made contact with a twenty-seven-year-old woman who conveyed a story of horrific abuse. Her story is weighted with intricate details, which buttressed its credibility: She grew up in the Omaha area, and she said that starting at the age of thirteen she had been subjected to repeated molestations and beatings by her father and pornographically photographed by one of his friends. She told Caradori that she was regularly forced to accompany her father on nighttime jaunts to a church in Omaha or a location in Lincoln where groups of older men took turns molesting her. She knew few identities, and Caradori was never able to link her directly to the subjects of his investigation. But her father worked in the communications field, and she did identify a local newscaster as one of her abusers. She also related to Caradori that her father had delivered her to a hotel room where Citron awaited. Citron, however, became enraged that her father had furnished him a little girl instead of a little boy—he kicked her out of his room, demanding her brother. She said that her father battered her for disappointing Citron.
Citron’s arrest was in the wake of a major metamorphosis at the World-Herald: Larry King booster Harold Andersen ⇭[communications? DC stepped down as the World-Herald’s CEO after over two decades, and became a contributing editor. Shortly before Andersen relinquished his lofty status at the World-Herald, he and his wife were honored by the Nebraska Society of Washington, DC with its annual Distinguished Nebraskan award—it was the first time the Society honored a couple with the award. Nebraska Senator J.J. Exon presented the award to Harold Andersen, and Governor Kay Orr presented the award to his wife. The ceremony even included a tribute letter from President George H.W. Bush, who bestowed praise on Andersen for his “efforts to improve the quality of life in his community.” Bush also described the World Herald as “an example of journalistic integrity.”
By the time of Larry King’s hospitalization and Citron’s arrest, Caradori found himself treading a treacherous minefield that required him to navigate tapped phones, repeated intimidation, and harassment of victims and witnesses. To circumvent the scrutiny and surveillance, he started using pay phones and taking other covert measures to ensure the integrity of his investigation. Though Caradori took measures to nimbly sidestep a gauntlet of potential hazards, he couldn’t dodge criticism as his investigation became the focal point of “leaks” and media bias, led by the World-Herald.
James Allen Flanery’s World-Herald reportage on Franklin had been unprejudiced and attentive, but he took a leave of absence from the newspaper for a year in August of 1989 to teach journalism at the University of Kansas. The World-Herald ultimately replaced Flanery with reporters who were seemingly hostile to the Franklin Committee and its investigation, and they started churning out articles that were clearly slanted. The Committee mandated that Caradori refrain from media interaction, and he was forced to be a bystander as a hostile media started dismantling his investigation—and the victims he had interviewed.
Caradori also started to take considerable heat from the local media for the expenses Caracorp was accruing after the Committee’s press conference announcing its twenty-one hours of videotaped statements. The media inquiries prompted Nebraska’s Secretary of State to scrutinize Caracorp’s billing. Under the terms of Caracorp’s contract with the Committee, Caracorp charged the Committee a whopping $24.00 an hour for investigative services and $7.00 an hour for clerical support.
In a comeback letter to the Secretary of State, Caradori wrote that it was unfortunate he was forced “to respond to questions from unnamed sources arising out of Caracorp’s role in the Franklin Credit Union Investigation,” but he nonetheless “appreciated the opportunity to clarify” his handling and billing of the investigation. “Please understand that if I were billing this directly, as a private investigator, my billing rate would be anywhere from two to four times higher,” Caradori wrote in the letter.
After Caradori politely explained Caracorp’s charges, he turned his attention to the “unnamed sources” provoking the Secretary of State’s inquiry: “This infatuation with my billing and their scrutiny of my abilities and integrity can only be construed as something similar to a ‘witch hunt.’ Why? Am I too close to something they do not want to become public?” Caradori also touched on the peril he and his employees had faced throughout the investigation: “I must reiterate that we—my employees and myself—have been followed and questionable situations have arisen during this investigation. Threatening situations have resulted numerous times.”
In February, Caracorp was slapped with its first federal subpoena. The subpoena ordered Caracorp to surrender every shred of its evidence regarding the individuals named in the DeCamp Memo. Inexplicably, Omaha’s KMTV Channel 3 obtained a copy of the subpoena and broadcast excerpts of it. The subpoena would be the first of many leaks that state and federal law enforcement would pin on Caradori and the Committee. In a World-Herald article, First Assistant US Attorney Thomas Thalken exclaimed that leaking the subpoena was a “deplorable” act, and he “assumed” it was provided by someone affiliated with Caracorp or the Committee.
Thalken’s allegation made Caradori’s blood simmer, and he was quick to fire off a memo to the US Attorney’s Office. In the first paragraph of the memo, Caradori commented on the risks of making assumptions: “To ‘assume’ in the investigative business is as dangerous as ignoring evidence and supportive evidence, when evidence is presented. It is appalling, and certainly disquieting, when the US Attorney’s Office makes public assumptions on any matter.” Later in the memo Caradori pointed out Thalken’s double standards and demanded proof for his statements to the media: “For you, Mr. Thalken, to ‘assume’ that information regarding the subpoena came from me or my office puts you in the same rumor mill as the people you are criticizing…. Also, it is recommended that you verify your sources before you ‘assume’ anything publicly or otherwise about matters related to this investigation.” Thalken never provided the proof Caradori requested.
A February article published in the World-Herald, “One Accuser was Guilty of a Felony,” reported that a twenty-one-year-old victim videotaped by the Committee was incarcerated at York for a bad check “felony.” The article didn’t directly name Alisha Owen, but it essentially marked a red bull’s-eye on her forehead. The article also detailed that a second videotaped victim had been the “subject of legal proceedings” in the Douglas County juvenile court. A second February World Herald article concerning Owen, approximately a week later, discussed the accuser’s “run-ins with the law in 1988 and 1989,” and mentioned she had been treated for “mental problems.”
Later in February, the World-Herald assaulted Owen’s motives for giving Caradori a formal statement: The article quoted Nebraska’s outgoing Corrections Director discussing the “21-one-year-old inmate” who “has given videotaped testimony to a legislative committee”—the article appeared two days before he bowed out of Nebraska to become Colorado’s Corrections Director. Showing remarkable disregard for Owen’s confidentiality, he said the inmate told prison officials that investigators involved in the child-abuse probe promised to have her sentence reduced. His statements, however, were at odds with the waiver signed by Caradori and Owen, which explicitly stated that no “promises” were made to Owen. The Director also said that Caradori and Ormiston were the inmate’s only regular visitors, even though York’s Visitor’s Register showed that family members visited Owen on a regular basis.
Since Owen had granted Caradori an interview, her quality of life had severely diminished: She had been harassed by the NSP, attacked by fellow inmates, confined to segregation, and the World-Herald had maligned her character. But those were only opening salvos: On the night of March 8, FBI agents and the NSP, executing a federal search warrant signed by Magistrate Kopf, raided Owen’s cell and seized a number of her personal belongings, even though York’s warden confirmed to a reporter that prison officials had the authority to search her cell and confiscate items at their whim. Committee Chairman, Senator Schmit, was shocked by the actions of the FBI and NSP: “I’m speechless,” he said about the search. “It would seem to me that they would have enough leads from the stuff we dumped into their laps…”
A March World-Herald article reported that Caradori hadn’t used lie-detector tests on the three victims. Shortly thereafter, a Lincoln Journal article, citing an “anonymous source,” reported that the two young men videotaped by Caradori flunked FBI polygraphs. The source said that the young men fabricated their stories because they were seeking riches via movie and book deals and also to help their friend dodge prison time.
The World-Herald, chronicling the earlier Lincoln Journal story, had a catchy frontpage article: “Paper: 2 Franklin Witnesses Flunked Lie Detector Tests.” The FBI refused comment on the leak, but a state senator who wasn’t affiliated with the Committee denounced the leaks as a violation of federal law and expressed his disgust over law enforcement’s response to the child-abuse allegations: “I’ve been around a lot of investigations in my 53 years, and I’ve never seen one like this in my life.” [A blind person could see this cover up DC]
Members of Concerned Parents and other citizens who were deeply disturbed by the World-Herald’s depiction of the victims repeatedly picketed the newspaper. The protesters passed out literature and touted signs—“Lie Detector Tests for Victims? Lie Detection for Suspects,” “Reporting or Fabricating,” “Pravda of Plains,” etc. A spokesperson for Concerned Parents was interviewed by a local television station, and she said that Nebraska’s “Bar-Press Guidelines”—voluntary principles that the Nebraska Bar Association and the media have agreed upon to provide fair trials for defendants—forbade the newspaper from attacking the credibility of the victims.
In response to the criticism, the World-Herald released an outlandish statement that justified its declaring open season on the victims. The newspaper put forward that the Bar-Press Guidelines were “designed to protect the rights of defendants not their accusers,” and because there are no defendants, “the Bar-Press Guidelines haven’t kicked in.” The Bar-Press Guidelines also discouraged publication of a defendant’s prior criminal record, but, again, the newspaper replied that this didn’t apply to the victims since they were not “defendants.” [not a 'news' paper,in fact a propaganda rag sheet in league with criminals to cover up their activity, and THIS has not changed! DC]
As leaks and newspaper coverage chipped away at the victims’ credibility like a jackhammer, Caradori wasn’t prepared for his investigation’s next ambush: His twenty-one hours of victim testimony inexplicably ended up at an Omaha TV station! By the end of March, KETV had acquired Caradori’s videotapes. At first, the station allowed J. William Gallup, an Omaha defense attorney, to screen excerpts of the tapes—Gallup exclaimed that he was “shocked” by Caradori’s questioning methods, and accused Caradori of leading the victims. Gallup didn’t seem to be particularly fond of the victims either—he later called Alisha Owen a “short, fat, ugly girl” during a speech he delivered to Omaha’s Rotary Club, and the World-Herald quoted him.
Gallup would quickly become a media darling for his outspoken criticism of the Committee and its investigation, and he routinely provided TV sound bites and World-Herald jibes—Gallup’s law firm actually represented Franklin’s financial mastermind Thomas Harvey! Shortly after Gallup’s Franklin debut, KETV started to broadcast almost nightly excerpts of the tapes with the victims’ faces scrambled.
The other stations in Omaha also acquired Caradori’s tapes, and they became quite a spectacle on Omaha’s nightly news. The leaked tapes sent a resounding message to victims who might have the temerity to step forward: In addition to being crucified in the print media, they would also be telling their deepest and darkest secrets to the greater Omaha area. The leaked tapes were a gushing catastrophe for Caradori, because he now found it nearly impossible to coax victims from the shadows.
A March World-Herald article, “2 Officials Disagree on Source of Leaks,” quoted Senator Schmit and Assistant Attorney General Howland sparring over the source of the leaks. Schmit stressed that the leaks occurred after the Committee relinquished the tapes on December 27 and implicated state or federal law enforcement: “There were no leaks as long as I had full possession of the tapes,” he said. Howland, who spearheaded the Attorney General’s early investigation into the abuse allegations— an investigation that hadn’t interviewed a single victim—teed off on Schmit: “This is ridiculous, just farcical,” retorted Howland. “It’s unfortunate that the senator feels obliged to make accusations against law enforcement…. Now they’ve got a hot potato, and they don’t know what to do with it.”
In a subsequent World-Herald article, “Schmit: Abuse Victims Fear Scrutiny,” Schmit commented on the seemingly insurmountable difficulties that Caradori faced: “If you were an abused child and you heard the reports about the original three witnesses who came forward and then you saw what happened to those witnesses, would you come forward now? Or would you just hunker down and say, ‘I’ve taken all the abuse I’m going to take’? You’d say, ‘The hell with it. There’s no point talking to anybody because they’re going to cover it up.’”
By April of 1990, Alisha Owen had taken a beating in the press, and, like Gary Caradori, she was acutely interested in finding out who exactly had leaked the tapes to the TV stations. Unlike Caradori, however, Owen had an ace to play in discovering the source of the leak: For a media personality she would have been the hottest ticket in town—her scrambled silhouette saturated the Omaha airwaves, and she resolutely shunned media attention and requests for interviews.
But in the second week of April, Owen phoned KETV’s on-air personality Mike McKnight and consented to an “off the record” meeting—York’s Visitor’s Register confirms that McKnight visited her on April 12. In a quid pro quo, Owen offered to make particular disclosures if McKnight revealed who had leaked the tapes. According to Owen, McKnight said that FBI personnel hadn’t actually leaked the tapes to the TV station—they had sold them! Though McKnight would eventually be subpoenaed to give an account of how he acquired the tapes, the subpoena would be quashed. [These are NOT the actions of a federal investigative agency,they are the actions of a STATE Gestapo,and folks are naive if they think anything has changed...no truth be told,it has snowballed DC]
In Franklin, the perception of reality intended for public consumption was basically a byproduct of the media, and the imperceptible reality generating that perception was primarily law enforcement—the wizard behind the curtain. Law enforcement’s Byzantine machinations were generally devised in stealthy conclaves, and on January 17, 1990, the top brass from the US Attorney’s Office, Nebraska Attorney General’s Office, FBI, NSP and OPD met to discuss the Franklin “investigation.” At that meeting, the FBI played its federal trump card: The FBI would conduct the impending investigation and interview the victims on “FBI terms.” [One word....Gestapo DC]
Though Caradori wasn’t cognizant of the January 17 conclave, he by now knew the meaning of “FBI terms”: the FBI would subject Alisha Owen, Troy Boner, and Danny King to an inhumane pressure cooker until they melted. Caradori steadfastly hoped that their attorney, Pamela Vuchetich, had the wherewithal to abate their upcoming trial by fire.
Caradori had investigated a child sexual abuse case for Vuchetich, and he introduced her to Troy Boner in November 1989. In December, Vuchetich consented to represent Owen, Boner, and King in litigation that might arise from their alleged abuse. The attractive thirty-five-year-old was married and the mother of two young children. Vuchetich was born in Topeka, Kansas, where her father had been a psychiatric resident at Topeka’s Menninger Institute.
Her family then moved to Lincoln, Nebraska, and she graduated from Lincoln’s Southeast High School. She studied modern dance at the University of Utah and upon her graduation took a shot at a dance career in New York. Four years later, she aborted her theatrical aspirations, returned to Nebraska, and enrolled at the University of Nebraska Law School. The self-employed Vuchetich shared a Lincoln office with her father, a practicing psychiatrist.
Initially, Vuchetich sounded dedicated to saving the children—a veritable catcher in the rye. A February 1990 World-Herald article quoted her saying that her three clients were entangled in a teenage prostitution and pornography ring centered in Omaha that included “at least 100” victims. The article reported that Vuchetich had inferred the scope of the ring from the videotaped statements of her three clients. Attorney General Spire responded that he had watched “significant excerpts” of the twenty-one hours of videotaped interviews provided by the Committee, but he had no knowledge of whether or not 100 youngsters were involved. “If she has information of that kind,” Spire said, “she should report it to authorities.” Both the US Attorney for Nebraska and the NSP declined to comment on Vuchetich’s statements.[That is a laughable statement by the AG considering what was transpiring with the three who had come forward,and the 'authorities' actions to this point DC]
A week after Vuchetich commented on the scope of the Omaha ring, she asserted that the World-Herald had misquoted her. Vuchetich told a Lincoln Journal reporter that she spoke in generalities when estimating the scope of the Omaha ring, because large child prostitution rings typically number 100 or more victims. In the Lincoln Journal article, she maintained that a “legal code of ethics” prevented her from discussing the facts of the case, and therefore, she didn’t make those comments. Vuchetich also suggested that the World-Herald’s misquotes corresponded to a pattern of sullying the Committee’s investigation. “I feel like they’ve tried to discredit the Committee and they’ve tried to discredit the investigator … and now they’re trying to discredit me,” she said. The World-Herald, though, wouldn’t budge, and its managing editor issued a statement that the newspaper had “full confidence” in the reporter and stood behind the story.
Vuchetich demanded that federal and state law enforcement give Owen, Boner, and King immunity agreements before she made them accessible for interviews. Vuchetich said the immunity agreements would enable her clients to discuss “any criminal activity” they committed as a consequence of their association with the ring without fear of prosecution. In the February World-Herald article where Vuchetich reportedly commented on the scope of the ring that had ensnared her clients, she also announced that FBI investigators had interviewed her clients because she and US Attorney Lahners had negotiated written immunity agreements.
Though I’m agnostic concerning whether or not the World-Herald misquoted Vuchetich about the scope of the “ring,” her statements about all her clients receiving federal immunity are false. By the time of that article, Alisha Owen had signed a federal immunity agreement, but neither Troy Boner nor Danny King had received federal immunity.
Vuchetich arranged for the FBI to have a go at Boner and King long before they signed federal immunity agreements: A January 25 “FBI Memorandum” remarked that FBI Supervising Special Agent John Pankonin, FBI Special Agent William Culver, and two NSP investigators met with Vuchetich at her Lincoln office, and Vuchetich consented to let the agents interview Boner the following day.
Evidently, the date to interview Boner was pushed back because a later “FBI Memorandum” stated that Culver and NSP Investigator Charles Phillips returned to Vuchetich’s office on February 1 to question Boner, who was nowhere to be found. The memo said that Vuchetich had been “working” with Boner for several days, “preparing him for the interview,” but the streetwise Boner must have had a bad feeling about the meeting—he bolted to whereabouts unknown in the middle of the night because his immunity deal wasn’t worked out and he feared arrest.
Vuchetich, however, was considerate enough to ensure that the FBI hadn’t made the jaunt from Omaha to Lincoln in vain—after Boner fled she fetched Danny King. A February 2 FBI memo related that though Vuchetich said King “was not emotionally prepared to be interviewed,” he would be willing to meet with Culver and Phillips on an “informal basis in order to begin the interview process.” The “informal,” introductory meeting lasted two and a half hours, and Culver wrote a formal FBI debriefing on the interview.
The debriefing stated that “King was told that he would not be subjected to marathon interview sessions, but instead would be interviewed throughout several sessions over a period of time.” Culver and Phillips also “stressed to King that he should not feel that he must relate the exact same story to the criminal investigators that he told Caradori on the videotape.” The above excerpts from Danny King’s initial FBI debriefing contain a falsehood and a truth: The falsehood is that King wouldn’t be subjected to “marathon interview sessions,” and the truth is that the FBI “stressed” to King that he need not stick to the story he told Caradori.
The FBI debriefings of Danny King commenced in earnest on March 1 in a hotel room. FBI Special Agents Michael Mott and William Culver interviewed King, who was accompanied by Vuchetich. The first interview lasted approximately three hours, and King basically reiterated the events as they were spelled out to Caradori. The next day, the FBI interviewed King for approximately five hours, and, once more, he relayed the events as they were given to Caradori.
On March 5, however, Danny King started to recant his story: He said the stories about the two interstate flights to Los Angeles and Kansas City where Larry King pandered him and Alisha Owen were fabricated. The debriefing stated, “King said that he has decided to be totally honest with the interviewing Agents. He realized that the telling of fabricated stories would only hinder the investigation into any abuse that had actually occurred.” So after King “decided to be totally honest,” he told the FBI agents about his sexual trysts with Alan Baer at the Twin Towers. King vowed that he and Baer had sex about twice a month for three years.
According to the March 5 FBI debriefing of Danny King, Boner made a visit to King in Omaha the night before Boner and Caradori rolled up at King’s front door. Boner, however, was lodging in Lincoln without a car. During the alleged nocturnal visit, Boner supposedly described his upcoming visit with Caradori the next day, and stated that King needed to make up stories about the two interstate plane trips with Larry King. The FBI debriefing stated that the motives behind Boner’s actions were to “sue” Larry King and Alan Baer so Boner and Danny King would “get a lot of money.” Though Danny King was initially unsure about why the fabrication included Owen, the FBI debriefing later explained that King said Owen’s motive for the fabrication was to “get herself out of jail.”
The March 5 debriefing also mentioned that “King said Alisha Owen told him to tell the investigators about an old man named Rob picking her up at her apartment on several occasions for dates.” In King’s statement to Caradori, he said that in April or May of 1986 he answered the door to Owen’s apartment to find an older man named “Bob,” who drove a blue car equipped with a spotlight. King’s March 5 FBI statement about what “Owen told him” is in glaring contradiction to the fact that Danny King hadn’t talked to Owen since her incarceration at York.
A March 6 “FBI Memorandum” is extremely bizarre indeed: The memorandum discussed Vuchetich visiting the FBI’s Omaha Field Office and meeting with Supervising Special Agent John Pankonin and Special Agents Mott and Culver, and it detailed a conversation Vuchetich had with the boyfriend of Danny King’s mother. Vuchetich said the boyfriend related that Boner, 6’3” weighing 200 pounds, requested that the frail King, 5’6” and maybe 140 pounds soaking wet, act as Boner’s bodyguard that night, which would be like Hulk Hogan conscripting Peewee Herman to be his muscle.
Vuchetich also maintained that the boyfriend informed her that Danny King suggested to Boner they recruit “another victim,” but Boner vetoed the idea because “millions and millions of dollars” were at stake, and additional witnesses “would cut up the pie into smaller pieces.” Special Agent Mott purportedly phoned the boyfriend, but he “refused to be interviewed and terminated the telephone call.”
By early March, Pamela Vuchetich definitely seemed to be molting her save-the children persona, bringing Danny King to FBI agents again on March 8. Though King pledged “to be totally honest” on March 5, he evidently wasn’t able to seamlessly assemble the opus of lies that was now required of him. For example, after he turned over a new leaf on March 5, he said that Boner imparted the fabricated stories to him on the eve of his meeting with Caradori, but on March 8 he said Boner imparted the fabricated stories as Caradori filled his tank with gas. These contradictions didn’t seem to trouble the FBI agents.
On March 8, FBI agents apparently felt that King’s singing lessons had been sufficiently honed for a recital, because they invited US Attorney Lahners and 1st Assistant US Attorney Thalken to his debriefing, and King sang the following tune: “King also told Caradori that Troy Boner had fabricated several of the incidents Boner had told him about, and Alisha Owen was not involved in any incidents at all. King said he did not wish to fabricate stories and wanted to tell the truth. Caradori kept pressuring King to tell the whole story and not be afraid. After some amount of time, King decided that if Caradori wanted to hear the story so bad, he would go ahead and tell him, at which time King participated in the videotaped interview. King included in his taped interview all the fabricated stories that Boner had told him to.”
Danny King had a final debriefing on March 21, and by then he had recanted just about everything but his name, including his recurrent molestations at the hands of Baer. The March 21 debriefing is basically a cut-and-paste of the debriefings after King became “totally honest” on March 5, but it contained a new, innovative twist: King disavowed Boner’s visiting him on the eve of his initial contact with Caradori and also disavowed Boner’s explaining the fabrications to him as Caradori filled his gas tank: “Caradori and Ormiston left Danny King and Troy Boner in King’s room while they returned to Caradori’s room. Boner told Caradori that he and King were going to take a swim for about an hour. After Caradori and Ormiston left the room, Boner and King went to the bar in the hotel where they drank alcohol and talked for approximately one hour. It was during this hour-long meeting at the bar in the Residence Inn that Troy Boner first told Danny King what he (Boner) wanted King to tell Caradori.”
The FBI debriefing’s new, innovative twist is in glaring contradiction to Caradori’s Investigative Report from December 2, the day he initially met Danny King. The Investigative Report explicitly stated that Boner didn’t accompany King to the Residence Inn—Caradori drove Boner and King to Caracorp and, as Boner walked back to his apartment, Caradori deposited King at the Residence Inn.
The final paragraph of King’s March 21 debriefing ends on a serious note: “King told the interviewing Agent and Investigator that the facts as he is now relating them on today’s date is the truth and full truth and that he was not leaving any details out or fabricating anything that did not happen. He also understood fully that he would be taking a polygraph examination later in the day and would be asked about the truthfulness of this statement. He stated that this was the truth, and he had nothing to worry about from the polygraph.” And, lo and behold, Danny King passed the FBI’s polygraph.
Troy Boner had bouts of being hard to find after his attorney Vuchetich informed him that the FBI and NSP wanted to interview him. However, Caradori’s Investigative Report from March 5 indicated that Boner phoned him that day: Boner disclosed he had a “hard time” communicating with Vuchetich and had retained a new attorney, but he wouldn’t disclose how he initially made contact with his new attorney. He also mentioned that a “friend of his” had recognized a high-ranking official from the US Attorney’s Office on TV because that official regularly cruised an adult bookstore in Council Bluffs. Though Boner wouldn’t reveal his friend’s name over the phone, he consented to meet with Caradori the following afternoon in Council Bluffs. The next day, Caradori drove to the designated location of their meeting—he waited around for an hour. Boner never showed up.
Caradori’s Investigative Report from March 9 mentioned that Boner phoned him at approximately 1:00 A.M. that morning. Boner had signed his federal immunity agreement the previous day, and he was tormented and ambivalent. Boner said that the high-ranking official in the US Attorney’s Office who frequented the adult bookstore in Council Bluffs had threatened him with perjury charges, and he was “very scared”—Boner also told Caradori that this individual had a sexual penchant for “young kids.” Boner then informed Caradori that his videotaped statement was true, but Danny King’s was false. Boner maintained that he imparted the fabrication to King the day he and Caradori buttonholed King at his apartment, contradicting King’s final account of Boner’s imparting the fabrication. Caradori nonchalantly stated that he was “sorry to hear” that Boner had changed his story, and he reminded Boner that he and King were alone for a “minute and a half” and there was “no way in hell” they “could have concocted that story” in such a short time frame.
During the March 9 phone call, a terrified Boner requested that Caradori accompany him to Omaha’s FBI Field Office later that morning. Caradori consented but insisted Boner clear it with his new attorney—Boner replied that he would immediately phone his attorney. Ten minutes later, Caradori received a call from Boner’s attorney, who conveyed that he didn’t have a problem with Caradori accompanying him and Boner to the FBI—Caradori said that he would adjust his schedule accordingly. But Caradori received a call later in the morning that specified he “would not be accepted at the FBI office in Omaha.”
FBI agents had good reason not to have Caradori accompany Boner to the FBI— Boner was being put through the wringer and would soon recant his videotaped statement. According to a 1993 affidavit of Boner’s, FBI agents subjected him to a torrent of threats, and he ultimately concluded that he must either “lie or die”— Boner’s notion of “lie or die” may sound overly dramatic but, certainly by 1993, he had rationales for such a conclusion.
For Danny King, I possess the battery of FBI debriefings that show how his original statement was methodically whittled away, but, unfortunately, I don’t have a series of FBI debriefings that show how Boner was methodically broken down. Rather, I have a nine-page, handwritten statement he composed on March 20, 1990, at the FBI’s Omaha Field Office. Boner’s statement is nearly a categorical recantation of his videotaped statements to Caradori and also in stark contrast to Caradori’s Investigative Reports, even though strands of truth are woven into it.
He jotted down that Caradori initially approached his mother, and he also confessed to his initial late night phone call to Caracorp’s answering service that patched him through to Caradori’s residence. Boner wrote that Caradori said he was an investigator for a “Special Committee” and was aware of Boner’s being enmeshed in a pandering network because of information garnered from Owen, but Boner replied that he didn’t know a Larry King and hung up the phone. The next twist in Boner’s statement is peculiar though: He claimed he phoned the Lincoln Police Department and talked to an officer who said that Caradori was a former State Trooper and a private detective, and then he made a second call to Caradori. If Boner knew “nothing” about Larry King, why would he have bothered with phoning the LPD and then Caradori once more?
When Boner phoned Caradori a second time, his statement continued, he told Caradori that Owen was “lying.” Caradori threatened to subpoena him however, so Boner begrudgingly agreed to meet Caradori later in the morning. Caradori and Ormiston initially met Boner at an overcrowded Denny’s, and they ultimately decided on a less crowded restaurant. As Caradori, Ormiston, and Boner drove to the next restaurant, Boner said he reiterated that “this whole thing was bullshit.” Caradori, though, zealously insisted it had to be true.
After their arrival at the second restaurant, Caradori gave Boner the following pitch: Larry King and company are terrible men, and Caradori would help Boner sue them for millions of dollars and also help get a friend out of jail—Boner bought the pitch and decided to give Caradori a “statement.” Boner maintained that they returned to the house where he lived, he packed a suitcase, and told his fiancée he would be home in approximately “six months.” Upon arriving at Caracorp, Caradori described an event to Boner where Larry King, Owen, Danny King, and Boner took a trip to California and “Larry King dropped off the two little boys.” Shortly thereafter, Boner related, Caradori went into an employee’s office, phoned Owen, and handed the phone to Boner: “I got on the phone and said what in the hell is going on? She said sit down and relax—she will explain. She told me to cooperate with Gary. He will help us, and we will all be rich. She told me there were very important issues I needed to remember.”
Over the next twenty minutes, Boner’s drug-addled memory supposedly downloaded all the places, locations, people, dates, times, and parties that corroborated Owen’s videotaped statements. Caradori then talked to Boner and showed him pictures for the next three hours—Boner asserted that he didn’t “recognize” a picture of Larry King until Caradori “told me who he was.” Boner then supposedly gave his six-hour videotaped statement to Caradori. The FBI then polygraphed Boner regarding his hand-written statement and found that he passed with “excellent results.”
That’s the “official” story of how a great “hoax” was hatched, but Boner’s account obviously contains an assortment of problematic details. Boner claimed he didn’t meet Owen until 1988, when they started dating as boyfriend and girlfriend. Yet he involved himself in a dangerous scheme with a former girlfriend he had known less than two years, even after they split up and he was engaged to be married to another woman. And so on.
Another problem pertains to Karen Ormiston: Boner’s statement mentioned that she was constantly at Caradori’s side throughout the entire day of November 25, 1989. And after both the state and federal grand juries had besmirched Caradori’s methodology, Ormiston flew to Los Angeles in October of 1990 to undergo a polygraph assessing if Caradori had acted duplicitously concerning the victims he videotaped. She would be polygraphed by Hollywood-based Professional Security Consultants, and her examiner was the then-President of the National Polygraph Association. As the examiner questioned Ormiston, he monitored her blood pressure, pulse, upper and lower respiration, electrodermal skin resistance changes, and her blood volume responses. In addition to control questions, she was asked if Caradori threatened the victims, coached the victims, or advised the victims to fabricate their stories. She answered “No” to these questions, and the examiner concluded “that Ms. Ormiston answered all of the above relevant questions truthfully.”
Though it is hard not to conclude that Boner’s recantation was a tissue of lies, I freely concede that these inconsistencies aren’t irrefutable proof. However, I have the phone records for Caracorp on November 25, 1989, the day the hoax was supposedly hatched. The records clearly show that no Caracorp phone calls were placed to York, Nebraska or received from York, Nebraska on that date; Caradori, like the vast majority of Americans, did not have a cell phone in 1989. Further, I possess the log of all the phone calls Owen made from York in November and December of 1989 and it shows she didn’t place a single call on November 25.
The fact that the flight to California, which entailed the sale and/or murder of a little boy or boys, according to Owen and Boner, was the first recantation of both Danny King and Troy Boner indicates that FBI agents felt it imperative to dispel that story immediately. Such a deed is so evil and divorced from everyday reality that it defies imagination, but Caracorp’s phone records prove that Boner is lying about his purported conversation with Owen, and, if Caradori didn’t coach or advise the victims, as Ormiston’s polygraph implies and Boner later confessed, Boner and Owen either conjured up this seemingly implausible story independently or they were actually privy to the horrendous event.
The FBI started making forays to York in early February 1990—York’s Visitor’s Register shows that the FBI descended upon Owen for ten “interviews” in February but, surprisingly, Owen wouldn’t give an inch, even though she was confined to segregation and isolated.
Though Owen refused to recant her videotaped statement, the forces against Caradori and the Franklin Committee must have been rather pleased as the Douglas County grand jury began its deliberations. The leaks, abetted by the media, had effectively accomplished a meticulous hatchet job on Caradori’s investigation and the victims he videotaped, and the FBI had coerced Troy Boner and Danny King into recanting their accounts of the Franklin pandering network. Moreover, the leaked videotapes of the victims, which were now ubiquitous on Omaha’s airwaves, coupled with intimidation, had terrified additional victims from stepping forward, and the US Department of Justice had ensured that Larry King was safely tucked away in a federal psychiatric facility.
Caradori realized that he had stepped into the ring with the feds, albeit a corrupt subgenus of the federal government, but his innate moral barometer wouldn’t permit him to throw in the towel. And by May of 1990, Caradori compiled a “Leads List” of 271 people who may have been the victims, perpetrators, or witnesses of child abuse. The Leads List included the names of approximately sixty underage victims of alleged abuse.
Also in May, Caradori managed to videotape a fourth victim—Paul Bonacci— whose name he had gleaned from a member of Concerned Parents. The twenty-two year-old Bonacci was incarcerated at the Lincoln Correctional Center. In November, within weeks of Franklin’s fall, he had been charged with two counts of sexual assault on a child—his victims were two boys, thirteen and nine years old. Bonacci, like Alisha Owen, claims that shortly before his incarceration he was warned to make himself scarce and to talk to nobody.
After Bonacci’s arrest, the court appointed a psychiatrist, Dr. Beverley Mead, to determine if Bonacci was a “mentally disordered sex offender”—Mead would interview Bonacci six times and conclude in an April 1990 report that Bonacci wasn’t a mentally disordered sex offender, but, rather, that he suffered from Multiple Personality Disorder or MPD. Mead wrote that Bonacci has “20 or more alternates, several of them well-formed, as much or more so, than Paul himself….” Bonacci’s alternates, Mead discovered, had an “individual identity, a different name, and certain individual characteristics.” Mead found that various alternates had heterosexual orientations and others homosexual orientations; some alternates were even color blind. Mead felt the “principal personality Paul has no wish to molest children, is quite religious, and is not inclined to have homosexual interests.”
Mead’s April report stated that Bonacci wasn’t cognizant of his MPD prior to Mead’s interviews, and “he is still mystified by the situation and finds it difficult to accept.” According to Mead, MPD is associated with a “very disorganized childhood,” where the child undergoes “severe and often repeated abuse,” and this was “quite true” in Bonacci’s case.
Born in the Omaha area, Bonacci was the second youngest of six children. His parents divorced when he was a toddler, and he had minimal contact with his biological father during his formative years. His mother’s second husband repeatedly pummeled Bonacci and his siblings—he told Mead that he remembered his stepfather chopping up the kids’ toys with an axe. Bonacci’s mother and her second husband divorced after he severely battered her.
She remarried shortly thereafter—her third husband didn’t subject Bonacci to physical abuse but simply ignored him. At the age of six, Bonacci told Mead, a neighbor repeatedly molested him. Bonacci maintained that he informed his mother and stepfather about the abuse, but they disregarded his pleas for help. In third grade, Mead noted, Bonacci began to “lose time,” i.e., have blackouts of previous activities; Mead inferred that “these were the first experiences of having an alternate personality takeover.” At the age of nine or ten, Bonacci was turned on to drugs and child prostitution—his “friends” showed him a park where pedophiles cruised for children. Bonacci would perform sexual favors for money, but he never derived pleasure from these experiences “as Paul.”
By the age of twelve, Mead wrote, Bonacci was heavily enmeshed in drugs, child prostitution, and Satanism. He attended “a lot of parties where he served as a young male prostitute.” Mead’s report on Bonacci ended on a perplexing note: “Without treatment, it is conceivable (and this is probably what happened in the contact with the little boy) that if placed in an unusual circumstance, an alternate personality might temporarily take over and commit such an act of fondling, although it is also true that such behavior will be stopped, or at least quickly checked, by another alternate personality which would disapprove of such behavior. It all gets quite complicated.”
Gary Caradori and Karen Ormiston would videotape Bonacci for approximately seven hours at the Lincoln Correctional Center. By the time they interviewed Bonacci, Caradori and Ormiston had been on an extremely dark excursion for eight months, negotiating threats and dangers and edging into maybe the darkest crevice of the human condition. Still, they weren’t prepared for Paul Bonacci, who had spent much of his life entangled in a sinister web of child prostitution, kiddy porn, Satanism, and “scavenging” for vulnerable children.
The clean-shaven, well-mannered Bonacci had thick, dark brown hair, parted to the side, and a youthful face, but his eyes revealed a horrific anguish. When Caradori and Ormiston interviewed Bonacci, he had yet to receive psychiatric treatment for his MPD—he appeared to be devoid of emotion and almost autistic throughout most of the interview as he recounted tales of unfathomable abuse.
Bonacci named the same abusers as Owen, Boner, and Danny King, and he identified the same settings of pedophilic activity—the Twin Towers, French Café, and the Run Bar. Bonacci affirmed that he met the three at the Twin Towers in late 1983 or early 1984, but added that he had several sexual encounters with Citron, Baer, and Larry King before meeting the other three.
Bonacci maintained that he first met Citron at an Omaha area amusement park when he was around eleven years old. He discussed numerous sexual encounters with Citron from 1979 to 1987, and also group-sex encounters that Citron would photograph. Bonacci was aware that Citron had lived and worked in California from 1981 to 1984, and he mentioned that Citron would occasionally fly him to the West Coast during that time. Bonacci talked about being at Citron’s house when Citron molested a number of children —Citron was charged with sexually assaulting one of the children Bonacci named. His name had never been released to the media.
Bonacci told Caradori and Ormiston that he met Baer when he was approximately eleven years old as well, and he had hundreds of sexual encounters with Baer between 1979 and 1988—Baer would lavish him with money, jewelry, and drugs for their trysts. In 1981, Bonacci said he attended his first of approximately one hundred parties at the Twin Towers. Bonacci then named several children who attended the Twin Towers parties, including Jeff Hubbell, the Boys Town student who purportedly introduced Alisha Owen to Larry King’s pandering network. Bonacci, like Owen, named Rusty Nelson as a photographer who photographed the orgies.
Bonacci also spoke of the same sadistic abuse that had been described by Owen, Boner, and Danny King. He discussed being repeatedly tied up, whipped, cut by knives, and burned by cigarettes. Bonacci showed Caradori a scar that was left by a knife wound and also cigarette burns on his arms—he claimed to have cigarette burns on his genitals, too. He recalled a party at the Twin Towers, in Baer’s apartment, where he was forced to perform oral sex in rapid succession on five adult males.
In addition to recurring molestations at the hands of Citron and Baer, Bonacci would name Larry King as both a perpetrator and a pedophilic pimp. Bonacci disclosed that King took him on possibly three hundred flights around the country as an underage prostitute, and he mentioned several nuances about Larry King or his network that were also mentioned by Owen, Boner, and Danny King. For example, he stated that Larry King was fond of kids urinating on him, corroborating Boner. Bonacci also told Caradori and Ormiston that he had personally witnessed Owen and Chief Wadman having sexual relations.
He corroborated Owen about Larry King’s African-American henchman named “Larry”—Owen gave him the impromptu moniker of “Larry the Kid,” and Bonacci called him “Larry the Enforcer.” They both described him as a muscular black male in his twenties—Owen confessed to being molested and slapped around by “Larry the Kid,” and Bonacci said that “Larry the Enforcer” had assaulted him on three occasions. Their descriptions and accounts of him were strikingly similar.
Bonacci was almost catatonic as he detailed the countless molestations he endured and the flights with King, but he actually broke down and bawled when he talked about a trip to Sacramento, California in 1985. According to Bonacci, Larry King chartered a plane that departed from Eppley Airfield, near Omaha. The plane made a stop in Grand Island, Nebraska, where King picked up camera equipment, and then they stopped in Aurora, Colorado to pick up a boy named Nicholas, who was approximately thirteen years old. The plane refueled in Las Vegas, Nevada before landing at Sacramento.
In Sacramento, Bonacci said, they rendezvoused with a “little Italian guy” whom he identified as the “producer.” The producer subsequently drove Bonacci, Nicholas, King and the pilot of the plane to a remote wooded area, where they met a few additional men, who comprised the “camera crew,” and also a young boy named “Jeremy”—the producer said that Jeremy had been kidnapped. Jeremy was jostled into a small cage, and after he was let loose from the cage, Bonacci and Nicholas were ordered to run him down and drag him back to the older men. Bonacci stated that Jeremy divulged to him that he was from Idaho—he described Jeremy as roughly twelve years old, having braces on his teeth, with blond hair and brown eyes. Bonacci sobbed when he told Caradori and Ormiston that he and Nicholas were forced to have sex with Jeremy while members of the camera crew kicked and beat the three of them—an adult male then kicked Jeremy in the face, molested him, and, as Jeremy screamed, shot him in the head with a handgun.
Following the filming of Jeremy’s murder, Bonacci said, he was transported to the hotel, where he had sex with the pilot. He described the pilot as having brownish blonde hair, a brown eye and a blue eye, a scar on his left arm, and an eagle tattoo on his chest. After having sex with the pilot, Bonacci slit his wrists in the hotel room.
Bonacci’s account of his trip to Sacramento and its aftermath was given to Caradori and Ormiston with great detail and profuse emotion. His description of Jeremy’s murder is comparable to Shawneta Moore’s account of the sacrificed children and also to Owen’s and Boner’s account of the little boy or boys in California who were either sold or murdered, a realm of evil that places absolutely no value on a child’s life. The narratives of Moore, Owen, Boner, and Bonacci beg an extremely disturbing question: Are they making up these implausible stories independently, or did they actually witness these events?
Bonacci discussed trips to Washington, DC with Larry King that also sounded improbable. Bonacci implicated King in a DC blackmail operation and said that he made numerous trips to DC with King to be used as a boy-toy for politicians and other power brokers who in turn were then “compromised.” Caradori asked Bonacci to name the compromised politicians, but Bonacci could only identify one by name —he was in the US Congress.
Before Caradori found Bonacci, OPD detectives had conducted a series of interviews with him earlier in 1990. According to Bonacci, he made many of the same disclosures to the OPD detectives that he made to Caradori—Bonacci said he gave the OPD a diary that contained detailed accounts of his abuse, named his abusers, and even contained a pornographic picture of him and Alan Baer.
But the OPD said they investigated Bonacci’s allegations about Larry King, Baer, and Citron and couldn’t corroborate the allegations. The OPD also gave Bonacci a lie detector test, which was “inconclusive,” but the investigating detectives dismissed him as a pathological liar nonetheless. Bonacci told Caradori and Ormiston that the OPD didn’t take his allegations seriously and made threats to ensure he recanted them. Indeed, Caradori was subjected to ridicule within the OPD for even interviewing Bonacci—the OPD asserted that Bonacci garnered all of his information through the “jailhouse grapevine.”
Throughout Caradori’s interview of Bonacci, he made a number of contradictory statements that Caradori duly noted. Conversely, Bonacci provided Caradori with a number of fine details that would be extremely difficult to ascribe to the jailhouse grapevine. It’s conceivable that the names of Larry King, Alan Baer, Peter Citron, and Robert Wadman could have coursed through jailhouse scuttlebutt because of Franklin’s intense media exposure and notoriety. It’s also conceivable, though less likely, that the names of Alisha Owen, Troy Boner, and Danny King could have been gleaned this way. But how would Bonacci have known about photographer Rusty Nelson, and how could he corroborate Alisha Owen on the name of Jeff Hubbell, or name one of Citron’s victims? If Bonacci wasn’t involved with Larry King, it’s exceedingly improbable he would have been able to corroborate Boner’s account of King’s penchant for “golden showers.”
In my interviews with Rusty Nelson, Alisha Owen, and Danny King, they all confirm that Bonacci attended child-sex parties at the Twin Towers—Troy Boner’s 1993 affidavit confirms this fact too. Moreover, it would have been next to impossible for Bonacci to know about Larry King’s DC activities if he wasn’t thoroughly enmeshed with Larry King—Owen, Boner, and Danny King were unaware of Larry King’s DC deeds.
Though Bonacci provided Caradori with several details that led him to believe Bonacci had been a child prostitute in the Franklin pandering network, he couldn’t account for many of his contradictory statements. On a veracity scale of one to ten, where ten represented absolute veracity, Caradori gave Bonacci a seven and a half.
Dr. Mead was called to testify before the Committee because its members wanted to understand Bonacci’s disorder and determine his credibility. Mead told the Committee that Bonacci’s contradictory statements didn’t necessarily mean he was “lying,” but, rather, they were the outward manifestation of Bonacci’s assuming completely different personalities. In other words, over the course of an interview with Bonacci the interviewer might be interacting with several different personalities, who would have different perspectives on any given event; some alternate personalities wouldn’t even be able to recall a given event, whereas others would be able to describe it in precise detail.
I’ve watched Caradori and Ormiston’s videotaped interview of Bonacci in its entirety, and his lack of emotion is consistent with untreated MPD: If he approached details that were uncomfortable or painful, he would merely switch to an alternate personality to evade those feelings. I realize that this explanation for Bonacci’s emotionless deportment may sound like voodoo psychiatry, but it is supported by extensive psychiatric literature.
On June 22, 1990, the Franklin Committee and Caradori assembled at the statehouse to discuss a number of disconcerting events and numerous frustrations. A transcript of the closed-door meeting conveys that the Committee members were shell-shocked from a flurry of media barrages and law enforcement affronts, but they were resolved to talk through their qualms and suspicions to avert descending into a collective bunker mentality.
By then, state and federal grand juries were in the process of investigating child exploitation allegations related to Franklin. During the June meeting, Caradori voiced his reluctance to furnish the evidence he was amassing to state and federal law enforcement, since he believed they were using it to sabotage his investigation. He explicitly warned the Committee that “various people in the FBI” and the NSP were deliberately hijacking the state grand jury. According to Sandi Caradori, Gary felt true heartbreak when he first realized that NSP investigators were colluding with the FBI to crush his investigation, because he had treasured his years in the NSP.
The Committee members also conversed about a strange, recurring phenomenon that plagued their prospective witnesses—they would earnestly consent to testify before the Committee, and then they would “disappear” or “refuse to show up.” A second recurring problem that the Committee discussed was that individuals who assisted the Committee suddenly found themselves clobbered by the federal government. Senator Schmit commented on the latter phenomenon: “There seems to be a tendency for those who cooperate with this Committee to suffer harsh penalties before the law.”
Though Schmit was referring to a general “tendency,” his remarks came in the aftermath of a discussion about a former Franklin Credit Union executive named Noel Seltzer, who had the temerity (or naïveté) to grant Caradori a formal interview. Seltzer had little tangible evidence to offer Caradori concerning King’s abuse of children, even though he was fairly knowledgeable about the credit union’s day-to-day financial operations. A Committee member also mentioned that she had spoken with Seltzer, and he alleged that FBI agents had warned him: “Keep your mouth shut.”
I too have interviewed Seltzer about his tenure at the Franklin Credit Union. I found Seltzer to be a decent and honest person who was evidently a victim of his own trusting and innocent nature. He unsuspectingly stumbled into the Franklin hornets’ nest and remained oblivious of the hornets until being stung. He was also relatively insulated from Larry King’s antics—his office wasn’t located at Franklin’s main branch in North Omaha, but in a South Omaha satellite.
Seltzer peddled Certificates of Deposit for the credit union, CDs that I believe he genuinely thought were legitimate. After Franklin’s closing, Seltzer would be indicted for tax fraud: He sold the CDs on a commission basis, and he claims that bookkeeper Thomas Harvey did not provide him with his income statements in 1986 and 1987, so he was forced to estimate his income for those years. Seltzer’s accusations may seem dubious, but two other Franklin executives made the same claims. The three maintained that they repeatedly requested their income statements from Harvey, but he never delivered them.
Assistant US Attorney Thalken prosecuted the three former Franklin executives. The government found that Seltzer underreported his 1986 and 1987 income by $39,780 and that a Franklin colleague underreported his 1986 and 1987 income by $98,258. Here’s where it gets interesting though: Seltzer received a very stiff penalty—seven months in prison. Conversely, his colleague, who underreported his income by approximately $60,000 more than Seltzer, was only given three years of probation, put under house arrest, and fined $1,000.
In a testament to Noel Seltzer’s naïveté, he made the mistake of handing Judge Cambridge a letter Gary Caradori had written on his behalf—Cambridge was of course the very same federal judge who had deposited Larry King “forthwith” in the Rochester psychiatric facility. In the letter, Caradori wrote that Seltzer had “provided valuable assistance in the Franklin Credit Union investigation.” He also wrote that he “found Mr. Seltzer’s information to be valid,” and he urged the judge “to consider this fact when weighing the merits of his case.”
Seltzer apparently thought the letter would stir a scrap of leniency from Cambridge, but, according to Seltzer, the judge became angry after reading Caradori’s letter. I think Seltzer’s account is reasonably corroborated by the fact that Cambridge threw the book at him. “You, in effect, by failing to file the correct 1040, stole from the US government and the taxpayers,” said Cambridge as he levied the maximum sentence on Seltzer. Cambridge also said that he felt Seltzer’s penalty “doesn’t quite fit the crime,” because the sentence guidelines “are on the low side of what the penalty should be” for tax evasion.
Prosecutor Thalken weighed in on Seltzer’s sentence too. Thalken proclaimed that if Seltzer had been honest about his tax returns, federal investigators “could have pierced this fraud that was going on at Franklin.” Thalken also said that Seltzer was only “one straw but a significant straw” in the Franklin debacle. So, Thalken, the US Department of Justice’s number-two man in Nebraska, concluded that Seltzer’s underreported $39,780 was a “significant straw” in the $40 million swindle: If Seltzer had properly reported his income, federal auditors surely would have swiftly swooped into Franklin and stopped Larry King and Thomas Harvey in their embezzling tracks!
Though Seltzer would prove to be a small, peripheral piece in the vast, intricate Franklin jigsaw puzzle, Gary Caradori applied his customary tenacity to the larger, inner pieces—like Alan Baer. Whereas Larry King emanated the gaudy aura of the nouveau riche, Baer descended from old money. His great, great uncle, Jonas L. Brandeis, founded the Omaha-based Brandeis Department Store chain in the late 1880s. Jonas Brandeis built up the chain with his three sons—Arthur, Hugo and Emil—and formed J.L. Brandeis & Sons; Jonas died in 1903 and left the company to his sons. The Brandeis brothers had a regrettable 1912—Emil Brandeis accompanied the Titanic to Davy Jones’ Locker and Hugo died of surgical complications—leaving Arthur the sole proprietor of J.L. Brandeis & Sons. Arthur died in 1916, and his son E. John Brandeis assumed the mantle of the flourishing Brandeis empire.
E. John quickly added two stories and a penthouse atop the Brandeis Building, the chain’s flagship store in downtown Omaha, and “the largest department store west of Chicago.” As Nebraskans made holiday pilgrimages to the Brandeis Building, because its window featured animated displays that were a novel attraction at the time, E. John swelled the Brandeis coffers with additional stores and shopping malls. E. John would also become a “jetsetter” well before the advent of the jet engine: He hobnobbed with the rich and famous on both coasts, took a stab at producing on Broadway, and maintained offices in New York, Paris, and London.
E. John, perched in his lofty penthouse overseeing his empire, was a high-flying symbol of the American dream, but he had a dark side. After only four years of marriage, his first wife divorced him in 1921 on the grounds of “extreme cruelty”— she was awarded a $400,000 alimony settlement. The next year, a railroad clerk sued E. John for absconding with his wife and whisking her off to the bright lights of New York. Later in the year he married again—his second wife divorced him on the grounds of “indignities and cruelty” after only a year of marriage, and she would be awarded $250,000. In three short years, E. John’s indignities and cruelties had enabled his two former wives to acquire $650,000 of his beloved wealth, a staggering sum in the 1920s, and he decisively renounced future matrimony. Moreover, bizarre occurrences were purportedly unfolding in his penthouse, including bouts of sexual debauchery with female employees and rumors of a murder.
Though E. John had a long, fabled history of frolicking, he hadn’t produced a legitimate heir to the family fortune; so he tapped his sister’s son, Alan Baer, as successor to the Brandeis fortune. Baer was born and raised in San Francisco, and, ironically, he majored in “child psychology” at Stanford University before serving in World War II. After Baer’s stint in the service, he journeyed to Omaha, where his uncle welcomed him into the Brandeis fold. Whereas the robust and swashbuckling E. John had a reputation of inveterate womanizing, globetrotting, and hunting big game in Africa, his nephew was short, scrawny, and cerebral.
Following the death of E. John in 1974, Alan Baer would prove to have the cunning of Octavian in the aftermath of Caesar’s assassination. He deftly maneuvered through protracted legal wrangling and emerged as the Brandeis potentate—he then purged Brandeis of executives who weren’t comfortable with his lifestyle. Baer would hold the purse strings of the Brandeis fortune until his death. He eschewed the pomp and circumstance of his uncle, and he seldom showed his face on the retail floors, preferring to summon floor managers to his office. On Saturdays, Brandeis employees would catch a rare glimpse of the casually dressed Baer as he made halfhearted attempts at customer relations.
E. John and his nephew had numerous dissimilarities, but they shared a runaway libido. Baer, unlike his uncle, enjoyed a long-term marriage, but the Brandeis rumor mills repeatedly churned out innuendo of Baer’s insatiable appetite for young men and even boys. Baer would ultimately earn a reputation as Omaha’s blueblood reprobate, and his plausible denials concerning homosexual trysts with minors were in short supply as Caradori’s investigation bore down upon him.
One Investigative Report mentioned that a Caracorp employee interviewed a former Brandeis executive who maintained that Baer was mortified about the “criminal aspect” of the matter, as opposed to “public knowledge” of his lifestyle or a “civil suit.” In other words, Baer coveted his gilded life, and his fear of being thrown in prison considerably outweighed any concern about his name being further besmirched. In an October 1989 Investigative Report, Caradori remarked that he had phoned Baer for the first time. Caradori later noted that the call stirred Baer to make inquiries about the investigation—inquiries that quickly ricocheted back to Caradori. Baer wanted to know if Caradori had dirt on him, and he was willing to shell out cash for worthwhile info.
After a flurry of phone calls in December, Baer and his lawyer consented to meet Caradori at an Omaha restaurant. Caradori’s Investigative Report related that they “discussed child abuse, transporting minors across state lines for sexual purposes, and drug trafficking.” Caradori advised Baer and his lawyer that he was aware of “times, dates, and locations,” and he indicated that it would be in “Mr. Baer’s best interest to contact Committee counsel, Steve Berry, in order to possibly set up an interview.”
Baer’s wealth and connections had afforded him an exquisite sanctuary from the legal consequences of his depraved lifestyle, but he also realized that Caradori was a hard-charging investigator, and Franklin was unraveling with a velocity that even a law-enforcement cover-up had difficulties outpacing. Fearing a long stretch in prison, Baer hedged his bets, and contacted the Franklin Committee to inquire about the prospect of immunity.
According to an affidavit from Senator Schmit, Baer’s queries about immunity provoked a response by the FBI that is almost inconceivable even within the context of Franklin. Schmit’s affidavit asserted that two attorneys representing Baer visited Schmit and two other individuals affiliated with the Committee in Schmit’s Lincoln office. The affidavit stated that the “two attorneys advised us with everybody present that the FBI officials dealing with them and with Alan Baer had warned Mr. Baer to ‘Keep your head down, or you’ll get it blown off, your mouth shut and talk to no one.’” [right,serving the people DC]
If the events described in Schmit’s affidavit are true, FBI agents were not above administering death threats to silence prospective witnesses. Schmit’s affidavit begs an extremely shocking question: If FBI agents were, in fact, threatening to murder prospective witnesses to cover up evidence, perchance were they actually willing to follow through on their threats?
By June 1990, Caradori had been immersed in the nightmare of Franklin for nearly a year. The nightmare included uncovering organized child abuse of a horrific nature, persistent media assaults, harassment and intimidation, and a seemingly concerted effort by state and federal law enforcement to sabotage his investigation. But Caradori realized that the nightmare also had a trap door: Federal and state authorities were possibly in the process of framing him to take the fall for scripting the child-abuse allegations.
An Investigative Report mentioned that Committee Counsel Berry received a phone call from a fellow attorney who warned him to “get out” of the Franklin investigation before he lost his license to practice law—Berry said the attorney “hinted” that Caradori had deceived the Committee by writing scripts for the victims he videotaped. A later Investigative Report noted that Caradori received a call from Owen, who made a similar claim: “She talked about the FBI hinting to her that if she changed her story … they would ‘go after’ this writer [Caradori] and Mike Casey for ‘fabricating’ the investigation.”
Gary Caradori had witnessed the FBI make short work of Danny King and Boner, fluently spinning truth into lies and vice versa. Caradori had no illusions about the truth being his ultimate sanctuary. He was also unsure if Owen and Bonacci would have the mettle to continue enduring their respective crucibles with state and federal law enforcement.
Caradori requested that the Committee defend him from the false charges that he surmised were stirring on the horizon, but the Committee declined to provide legal assistance. The following excerpt from a letter written by Berry to Caradori stated the Committee’s position: “I believe that the Committee has been very supportive of you throughout, but I do not believe that it is the function of the Committee to devote its energy to defending you.” Caradori and the Committee had butted heads before, but he felt that the Committee should have provided him with counsel, because his work for the Committee had transformed him from the hunter into the hunted.
On June 11, Caradori wrote a letter to renowned defense attorney Gerry Spence, requesting his representation. After mentioning an attorney who had approached Spence on his behalf, Caradori stated his problem: “The legal counsel for the Legislative Committee has come to me privately and informed me … I am being ‘set up’ for an arrest because of the evidence which I had discovered.” Caradori then gave a terse rundown of his investigation thus far: “In short, what we have discovered is only a small part of a nationwide child exploitation network. It is obvious that the people behind this organization are powerful and ruthless, and are going to great lengths to keep this matter contained.” He further stated that the network extended “to the highest levels of the United States,” which echoes the anonymous phone call received by Senator Schmit as the Committee was forming.
Caradori’s letter to Gerry Spence elucidated his foreboding at the might of his perceived foes, but his moral hardwiring evidently made him constitutionally incapable of conceding defeat and consigning further children to inevitable destruction. Caradori would now have to use his razor-sharp investigative skills to save his reputation and business, and, perhaps, his freedom. He needed pictures of the orgies—Alisha Owen, Troy Boner, Danny King, and Paul Bonacci all said they had been photographed.
Early on, Caradori had made a halfhearted attempt to obtain pictures through Michael Casey, but now he focused upon that goal. His search for pictures would be undertaken in extreme secrecy, and his Investigative Reports make scant mention of this quest. Caradori had agonizingly learned through trial and error that trust had to be meted out cautiously and carefully—his confidants had become few and far between.
A reporter for the Washington Times, Paul Rodriguez, had evolved into one of Caradori’s trusted confidants. King’s financial records had directed Caradori’s attention to Washington, DC, because the majority of King’s flight receipts listed DC as his destination and he also rented a DC townhouse. Caradori would discover that he wasn’t the only person investigating Larry King’s activities in our nation’s capital.
“One of the angles I was pursuing in our Washington, DC prostitution investigation were allegations that children were involved,” Rodriguez told me. “One of the names that crossed our radar was Larry King, which very quickly led us to Caradori’s investigation. Caradori’s investigation initially focused on the homegrown abuse of minors, but he said the underground network that he had been investigating was far larger than he ever anticipated.”
Following leads that might yield pictures, Caradori trolled other milieus on the West Coast and developed contacts within the occult fraternity. Paul Bonacci informed me that one of his final conversations with Caradori revolved around pictures— Bonacci told Caradori that Rusty Nelson was his best bet for pictures. Alisha Owen had also singled out Nelson as a photographer for Larry King during her videotaped interviews. Caradori commenced a hunt for Rusty Nelson.
Nelson, as I’ve noted, was my second formal interview after I leapt into the Franklin rabbit-hole. John DeCamp had arranged the interview. At first, I found DeCamp and Nelson to be rather strange allies, because DeCamp’s The Franklin Cover-Up painted an unsavory picture of Nelson: DeCamp discussed the OPD child pornography investigation into Nelson, depicting him as a “pervert,” and he also provided Caradori’s synopsis of Alisha Owen’s interview, which gave an account of Nelson photographing “group sex encounters” of minors and photographing Owen while “her hands were handcuffed and her feet were tied up.”
I talked to both DeCamp and Nelson to try to grasp their improbable association. Following the fall of Franklin, Nelson claims, FBI harassment and threats forced him to flee his native Nebraska, and he embarked on an odyssey throughout the southwest, Rocky Mountains, and California, working odd jobs and washing windows to make ends meet. Nelson eventually drifted to Oregon, where his van was pulled over and searched, resulting in an arrest and incarceration for possessing child pornography.
The “Oregon authorities” were groping for information on Nelson, and John DeCamp was the recipient of a rather astonishing phone call from Oregon law enforcement. In a 1997 affidavit, DeCamp said the following: “I, John DeCamp, received a phone call from Oregon authorities advising that they had arrested an individual named Rusty Nelson who had in his possession pornographic pictures and also a copy of The Franklin Cover-Up, which I had authored some years earlier.” DeCamp’s affidavit further stated that Nelson’s “family” phoned him and requested his legal assistance, even though Nelson had previously cautioned his family “to never let John DeCamp know where he was or how to contact him.” Nelson maintains that the FBI explicitly warned him not to talk to DeCamp.
DeCamp traveled to Oregon to determine if it would be possible to assist Nelson legally and also to peruse the pictures seized from Nelson’s van. Nelson sought clemency based upon his cooperation, but the State of Oregon put the kibosh on his request. DeCamp, however, with an Oregon detective at his side, was allowed to sift through some of Nelson’s pictures. DeCamp’s 1997 affidavit further stated that if Nelson’s pictures were “properly identified and validated,” they would “almost certainly prove the truth of the children’s stories.” DeCamp’s quest to preserve the pictures proved to be of no avail, and they were destroyed.
When I first interviewed Nelson in January of 2003, he was living in a rural Nebraska trailer park with his girlfriend. Their relationship would rupture, and Nelson would then crash at a succession of places, including his parents’ home, before he moved to the rural Nebraska trailer of a second girlfriend.
Approximately three years elapsed between Nelson’s breakup and his second romance, and I made a concerted effort to stay in touch with him throughout his various relocations. I even spent a night at his parents’ home, which was a very strange experience. Nelson’s parents are truly Ozzie and Harriet, salt-of-the-earth Nebraskans, and their son’s involvement in Franklin has brought them considerable anguish and heartache. They were acutely aware of my motives for associating with their son, but they nonetheless invited me to dinner and graciously accommodated me for the night. As the four of us had a pleasant dinner, we politely avoided discussing the topic of Franklin, even though it seemed to linger over the table like a dark cloud.
The first time I interviewed Nelson, I found him to ooze an unctuous, spooky vibe, and the story he outlined was so divorced from day-to-day Americana that it would have been next to impossible for me to listen to him without a filter of skepticism. But he came across as quite candid, and his deportment was very matter-of-fact—he didn’t feel compelled to convince me of the implausible events he discussed, which included allegations of pedophile politicians at the pinnacle of national power, Larry King’s CIA connections, blackmail, and the auctioning of children.
The events Nelson described and the politicians he fingered were explosive—I was determined to ferret out the truth. I spent numerous hours talking to him face to face and over the phone. I would buy him dinners and talk to him until the wee hours. I would put him at ease and then push him to fatigue, mentioning his previous statements, seeking additional details. To my utter astonishment, I encountered occasional discrepancies, but I didn’t catch him in any outright lies—despite Nelson’s conviction for child pornography, his history of psychiatric illness, and my earnest efforts to test his veracity.
However, another “surprise” suddenly transpired that changed my perspective on Nelson. He has an undying love of photography, and his girlfriend footed the bill for him to open a photography studio in Norfolk, Nebraska. Shortly after the studio opened for business, it was raided by law enforcement—Nelson was arrested for not registering as a “sex offender” and all of his photography equipment and computers were seized and impounded. Predictably, this event put an irrevocable strain on his romance. Once more, Nelson found himself without a girlfriend, homeless, and with absolutely no prospects of partaking in his beloved photography. He apparently lost his mind.
Prior to the raid, Nelson had largely shunned Internet “conspiracy theorists” who sought to interview him about Franklin, but now he seemed to grant interviews to all comers. As I read the articles and listened to the interviews, I was aghast—it was clear that his rage was redlined: He felt that Franklin had yet again decimated his life, and he began spewing—what I knew to be lie after lie after lie. Many of the statements he made were in direct contradiction to the statements he made to me; others, I concluded, were outright fabrications. I’ve come to believe that Nelson was never a paragon of sanity, and his involvement in these events and their repercussions had left him living on a very narrow psychological precipice—the raid on his studio served the function of pushing him over the edge.
Nelson epitomizes the problem of discerning Franklin’s truths from falsehoods: The credibility of those who extensively participated in its dark underside, and who are actually willing to talk, has been compromised by themselves and/or with a helping hand from law enforcement. That said, Nelson maintains that Gary Caradori contacted him through a “family member” when he was in New Mexico, and he agreed to meet Caradori in Chicago and slip him incriminating pictures that would blow the case wide open. Nelson gave that account to DeCamp in 1997—I have the transcripts of their preliminary telephone contacts—and he also delivered the same account to me in 2003. He’s never wavered about his Chicago rendezvous with Caradori.
On July 9, 1990, Caradori, accompanied by his eight-year-old son Andrew James (A.J.), flew his 1984 single-engine Piper Saratoga from Lincoln to Chicago. Caradori ostensibly made the jaunt to attend the July 10 Major League Baseball All Star Game with A.J., a die-hard baseball fan, whose Mets cap and baseball mitt were his most prized possessions. In a July 13 Investigative Report, Karen Ormiston remarked that Caradori made “several attempts” to contact her just prior to his Chicago jaunt, but they were unable to have a face-to-face connection—Ormiston felt Caradori had something of extreme importance to tell her that he didn’t feel comfortable discussing over the phone. Though Caradori didn’t meet with Ormiston before his departure to Chicago, his wife said he explicitly told her he would be meeting “Rusty Nelson” in Chicago before attending the All-Star Game.
After Caradori and A.J. landed at Chicago’s Midway Airport, Caradori’s hour-by hour activities are unclear prior to the game, but four sources—Paul Rodriguez, Sandi Caradori, Loren Schmit, and Donna Owen—say they received phone calls from him. His conversation with Rodriguez, who was in DC, was quite candid— Caradori unequivocally told Rodriguez that he was on the verge of acquiring pictures and other materials that would corroborate the victims’ stories. The calls Caradori placed to his wife, Schmit, and Owen didn’t overtly mention pictures; he undoubtedly thought their phones were tapped.
Caradori’s call to his wife cryptically conveyed to her that his Chicago trip had been a success. He also had a pithy conversation with Schmit that the latter relayed to a reporter: “Loran, we got them by the shorthairs.” Caradori, having talked to Alisha Owen’s parents on various occasions since initially interviewing their daughter, felt terrible about the horrors that had befallen her, and he told Donna Owen that she would be “the happiest mother in the world” upon his return from Chicago.
Nelson claims that he had left the Albuquerque area the previous day and drove through the night to meet Caradori in Chicago. “I met with Caradori briefly,” Nelson told me. “I gave him the pictures, and I got out of there.” In 2003, when I originally interviewed Nelson, he actually broke down and started to bawl as he described his rendezvous with Caradori. Prior to our first meeting, my only background on Nelson was from The Franklin Cover-Up, which cast him as a minion of darkness; I was absolutely stunned by his intense emotional outburst.
On the night of July 10, Caradori and his son A.J. attended the All-Star Game, which ended around 11:45 P.M., and they flew out of Chicago’s Midway Airport at 1:51 A.M. on July 11. Approximately an hour later, Caradori’s plane crashed in the cornfield of Harold Cameron, who lived near Ashton, Illinois. After Cameron heard the sound of a plane and then an explosion, he drove around his property, looking for the crash site. But it was dark, and the four-foot-high corn obscured the wreckage. The plane was spotted at daybreak by a medical helicopter, and deputies from the Lee County Sheriff’s Department were the first responders to the crash site, where they found the remains of Gary and A.J. Caradori.
Parts of the plane were scattered up to 1,800 feet from the fuselage, and the National Transportation Safety Board stated almost immediately that Caradori’s plane “broke up” in flight, because it was strewn over such a vast area, but the “exact mechanism” for the plane’s breakup was “unknown.” On July 12, the World-Herald originally reported that the Federal Aviation Administration’s regional air traffic control center lost radio and radar contact with Caradori’s plane at approximately 2:40 A.M., and the plane crashed between 2:40 A.M. and 2:57 A.M. The next day, however, the World-Herald reported that Cameron heard the plane explode around 2:30 A.M., and then an FAA spokesperson said that the crash occurred at 2:30 A.M.
Caradori’s crash has been the focal point of profuse speculation—both on and off the Internet. The Franklin Cover-Up only cited the call Caradori made to Schmit from Chicago—DeCamp’s book doesn’t discuss Caradori’s purported rendezvous with Nelson or the calls Caradori placed to his wife, Rodriguez, or Donna Owen. Given Nelson’s propensity to spin tall tales, it’s difficult to take his word at face value, but Caradori explicitly told his wife that he would be meeting Nelson in Chicago—I’ve known Sandi Caradori for over six years, and I find her credibility to be unimpeachable.
But even if Sandi Caradori is mistaken about her husband’s mentioning “Rusty Nelson” shortly before his departure to the airport, Caradori phoned Paul Rodriguez from Chicago and said he was on the threshold of acquiring pictures, and he also phoned his wife, Senator Schmit, and Donna Owen and cryptically conveyed that he had accomplished his Chicago objective. So if, in fact, Nelson is lying, there’s still considerable corroboration that Caradori most likely came by pictures in Chicago. Moreover, the day after Caradori’s death, Schmit told the Associated Press that Caradori had been in the process of trying to obtain pornographic pictures of the alleged victims.
The Internet is rife with accounts stating that the Lee County Deputy Sheriff who first responded to the crash site encountered a team of FBI agents, and a cornfield that was littered with pornographic pictures. I eventually tracked down the Lee County Deputy Sheriff in question, and he informed me that he was indeed the first official to respond to the crash site—he said he didn’t see a single FBI agent or pornographic picture when he initially responded to the crash.
However, farmer Cameron was huddled around the fuselage with local law enforcement after the plane was located, and he says one officer stated, “We better get the FBI involved in it.” The Lee County Coroner said that the FBI would only investigate the crash if there were signs of sabotage, and two days after the crash, the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) and the Lee County Sheriff announced that the crash entailed no signs of foul play. So it’s rather baffling that local law enforcement apparently discussed FBI involvement at the crash site.
In the July 12 article on Caradori’s crash, the World-Herald quoted the Lee County Sheriff saying there were “indications” that Caradori called in a “Mayday” before his plane crashed to the ground—a newscaster on an Omaha TV station also said that Caradori had radioed a Mayday prior to the crash. A spokesman for the NTSB wouldn’t confirm or deny a Mayday, but he said the FAA “tape” of Caradori’s radio transmissions was sent to Washington, DC to be analyzed. The NTSB ultimately announced that Caradori hadn’t issued a Mayday.
The Lee County Coroner held an inquest into the deaths of Caradori and his son. Th e World-Herald reported that the Chicago-based investigator for the NTSB testified that he “saw no evidence of an onboard explosion.” The inquest failed to find a reason for Caradori’s plane breaking apart in midair … but it nonetheless excluded sabotage. The Lee County Coroner also stated that toxicology tests conducted by the NTSB found no evidence of “drugs or foreign substances” in Caradori’s system.
I eventually acquired the toxicology report on Caradori and his son—I found that “no evidence of drugs or foreign substances” isn’t exactly false. Yet it is somewhat misleading. Carbon monoxide and cyanide testing are customary in the aftermath of a plane crash, but the toxicology report of the NTSB stated that a “carbon monoxide analysis” and “cyanide analysis” were “not performed” on Caradori and his son because of “insufficient” amounts of “tissue.” Moreover, the lab typically used by the NTSB for its toxicology analysis had certain “analytical procedures” and it wasn’t “presently operational.” So the analysis was performed by the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology in Washington, DC.
Caradori’s last statement to Senator Schmit was “We got them by the shorthairs,” and Schmit never bought the explanation that Caradori’s plane mysteriously “broke up” in flight. After the crash, Schmit said in an affidavit that he had been warned that Caradori’s life was in danger. He also wrote a letter to the NTSB regarding the backseats of Caradori’s plane that were never recovered: “I do not know anything about sabotage, but I have been told that a phosphorous type bomb would, in fact, vaporize metal and any other material with which it came in contact and that unless someone knew what they were looking for, it would be difficult, if not impossible, to detect.... I am sure there will be those who will scoff at such a suggestion, but there have been entirely too many violent deaths associated with this investigation...”
The NTSB released its final report on the crash two years after the fact. The report determined that the crash occurred at 2:21 A.M., contradicting the original statement by the FAA, and also its later statement. The report concluded that Caradori lost control of the plane “for an unknown reason,” but it cited “pilot fatigue and probable spatial disorientation of the pilot and/or an instrument malfunction” as likely “causes” for Caradori’s loss of control. As Caradori attempted to recover from “uncontrolled flight,” the report continued, the wings on his Piper Saratoga snapped off due to an “overload” of stress.
The personal effects of Caradori and his son salvaged by the NTSB were eventually returned to Sandi Caradori. A.J.’s little backpack and Caradori’s 35-millimeter camera were relatively undamaged, but the film in Caradori’s camera had been taken out and returned inexplicably developed. Caradori’s sturdy leather briefcase, a birthday present from his wife, was never returned. Ormiston told me that the briefcase was virtually an extension of Caradori—it almost “never” left his side throughout the Franklin investigation. If Caradori had scored pictures in Chicago, she felt, they definitely would have been in his briefcase.
The sudden demise of Caradori created a truly bizarre and macabre circus. Unbelievably, even in death, the World-Herald’s assault on Caradori’s credibility was unabated. A July 12 article, “Caradori Faced Criticism of Probe, Utah Firm” reported that the Utah division of his security company had committed the grave offense of employing an “unlicensed” security guard. In response to criticism for publishing a disparaging article on Caradori the day after his death, an Omaha newscaster gave the World-Herald’s rather disingenuous rebuttal: “The World-Herald defended the story saying there are people who allege foul play in the crash of Caradori’s plane … for that reason the paper is looking at all those who were critical of the private investigator.” The World-Herald reporter who bylined the article would later say that her source for the story was Pamela Vuchetich.
On the day of Caradori’s crash, several of his family and friends gathered at the Caradori home to comfort his grieving wife and son. Caradori’s death would again launch Troy Boner into the throes of tormented ambivalence, and, in the early evening, he made a stream of phone calls to the Caradori household. But Sandi Caradori was either talking to visitors or “in no shape” to talk to Boner. Later in the evening, Sandi Caradori finally took one of Boner’s calls—a tearful Boner told Sandi Caradori that her husband hadn’t dictated instructions to him during his videotaped statement. He said that threats had coerced him into recanting his videotaped testimony. Boner then voiced the same account to Sandi Caradori’s sixteen-year-old son. Boner eventually handed the phone to his mother, who also talked to Sandi Caradori—Boner’s mother reiterated to Sandi Caradori that her son had been threatened into recanting his prior statements.
After Boner’s mother expressed her condolences to Sandi Caradori, she handed the phone back to her son—Boner promised Sandi Caradori that the following day he would march into the FBI and also approach the media to set the record straight. Not hearing a peep about Boner on the radio or the television the next day, Sandi Caradori felt that his sudden surge of courage had been quelled by fear. He phoned her later in the evening, though, and said that he had, in fact, visited the Omaha FBI and told the truth, but he claimed the FBI agents he spoke to only laughed in his face. Boner also said that he talked to a television reporter who didn’t want to deal with him.
The following day, July 13, both Sandi Caradori and Karen Ormiston were subjected to a campaign of shock and awe. Ormiston found “handfuls of nails” behind the tires of a pick-up she frequently drove that was parked in Caracorp’s parking lot. Sandi Caradori somehow summoned the gumption to drive to Caracorp and assure her husband’s employees that the business wouldn’t be folding. When Sandi Caradori arrived at Caracorp, to her utter dismay, she found FBI agents standing in Ormiston’s office—her written account of that morning states that an FBI agent sporting a “smirk” introduced himself as “Mickey Mott.”
The agents descended upon Caracorp that morning and served it with a federal subpoena. The subpoena was issued on July 12, and it ordered Caracorp to surrender “any and all” of its Franklin evidence to federal authorities. In addition to Franklin evidence, the subpoena demanded a litany of additional documents— Caradori’s expenses, Caracorp’s payroll records, invoices for services billed, telephone records, checkbooks, receipts for billed and unbilled expenses, tax statements, etc. It’s interesting that the subpoena included “location of safe deposit boxes or offsite business documents storage facilities.” Perhaps the feds thought that Caradori might have squirreled away a few pictures? In response to criticism of the subpoena’s timing, US Attorney Lahners replied that it’s not always possible “to be polite.” The feds claimed they were building a “corruption” case against Caradori as a rationale for issuing the subpoena to Caracorp.
Sandi Caradori asked the FBI agents serving the subpoena if Troy Boner had contacted Omaha’s Field Office the previous day, and they initially responded that they couldn’t “confirm or deny” that information. Sandi Caradori then said that she had just lost her husband and son and deserved an answer. Her written account related that Agent Mott bent his head downward and said, “Yeah, he came to the office. But we can’t waste our time on him. He has lost all credibility.” If this is an accurate quote, it is indeed ironic that Boner would ultimately become the FBI’s star witness.
Though the FBI purportedly rebuffed Boner, he still couldn’t shake his torment. According to Senator Schmit and six other individuals affiliated with the Franklin Committee or Caracorp, Boner paid a visit to Schmit’s office on July 16 and recanted his recantation. Schmit held a press conference announcing that Boner had stopped by Schmit’s office to “set the record straight.” Shortly thereafter, however, Boner snapped back into line—he denied visiting Schmit’s office and refuted accounts that he had come clean with the FBI. In a World-Herald article, Charles Lontor, who had replaced Nick O’Hara as the Omaha FBI’s special agent in charge, even went to bat for Boner, stating that Boner never recanted his recantation to the FBI.
But Boner would learn that to whom much is given … much is expected. In the same World-Herald article where Boner was backed up by the FBI’s top man in Nebraska and Iowa, Boner declared that Owen made up the story about being assaulted by three York inmates. “I helped her make that up. I said, ‘Why don’t you say that someone hit you.’” Boner then elaborated how Owen “banged her head against the wall and hit herself on the lip.” York’s warden was incredulous of Boner’s account, because he said that Owen didn’t need to inflict bruises upon herself to land in segregation—she merely had to tell him she didn’t feel safe in the general population. You will also recall that the state Ombudsman’s office had previously refuted Boner’s charges.
The media would paint Gary Caradori as “delusional” and a “Keystone cop,” but his funeral wasn’t the funeral of a marginal character. Approximately five hundred people attended the memorial service for Caradori and A.J., and Caradori had twenty-four honorary pallbearers, including US Senator J.J. Exon and former Omaha Mayor Mike Boyle. The US Coast Guard also conducted a military tribute at the cemetery where Caradori’s body was interred.
Though the Franklin Committee hobbled along after Caradori’s demise, his death would prove to be the final coffin nail in its investigation for a couple of reasons. First, Caradori was an extraordinary investigator whose diverse talents were practically irreplaceable. Second, very few people who were affiliated with the Committee, Caracorp, Concerned Citizens, etc. felt that Caradori’s crash was an accident—they viewed it as a public assassination designed to send a message: None of you or your children are immune. According to a Chinese proverb: “Kill one man and silence one hundred.” In Caradori’s case, it was kill one man and his child and silence hundreds.
After Caradori’s death, the Franklin Committee hired former CIA Director William Colby to investigate Caradori’s plane crash. Schmit had lobbied for Colby to be appointed as the Committee’s initial counsel, but his fellow senators on the Committee overruled Colby’s appointment by a narrow margin because of Colby’s “political baggage.” By the time of Caradori’s demise, however, some of the more influential members on the Committee suspected that King’s pandering enterprise was connected to the CIA, and they felt that Colby might be able shed light on the crash.
In 1975, then-CIA Director Colby appeared before the US Senate’s Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, commonly called the Church Committee after its Chairman, Democratic Senator Frank Church of Idaho. Colby proved that he wasn’t averse to publicizing the Agency’s nasty secrets or “family jewels.” In front of a national television audience, he candidly confessed to assassination initiatives and mind-control programs that had been shrouded from the American public. Colby didn’t receive accolades for his candor, but, rather, incurred the wrath of ranking intelligence officials and President Gerald Ford—Ford fired him as CIA Director, and Colby was replaced by then-envoy to China, George H.W. Bush. Colby later wrote that he found solace in his disclosures before the Church Hearing, because he believed the CIA must be accountable to Congress and the public under the Constitution—he felt he had done the right thing, not only for his country but also for his conscience.
Given Colby’s prior candor on the CIA’s abuses of power, members of the Franklin Committee hoped he would have the means and mettle to provide a definitive explanation of Caradori’s death. But Colby wouldn’t say that Caradori’s death was a consequence of foul play—at least publicly. Writing to Senator Schmit about his investigation into Caradori’s crash, Colby stated, “I only regret that we were not able to penetrate more effectively the clouds of confusion and contradiction that have surrounded this whole case.” Though Colby wouldn’t publicly declare that Caradori had been murdered, I have been told that he apprised at least three people who were affiliated with either the Franklin Committee or Caracorp that Caradori’s death was an assassination.
In 1993, Colby also consented to be interviewed by the makers of Conspiracy of Silence, but he didn’t discuss Caradori’s death with Yorkshire Television. However, he did comment on the advice he dispensed to John DeCamp concerning his publishing of The Franklin Cover-Up: “I said you have to consider the possibility of some danger not only to your reputation but to your person.” Colby also promised to submit the Franklin Committee’s findings to the US Attorney General.
Approximately three years after Colby granted Yorkshire Television that interview, his body washed up on the banks of Maryland’s Wicomico River—he had been missing for nine days. The Maryland medical examiner’s office in Baltimore concluded that the seventy-six-year-old Colby had fallen out of his canoe as the result of a heart attack or stroke, suffered hypothermia, and drowned. On the surface, the medical examiner’s conclusions may seem rational, but Colby’s death is chock-full of enigmas.
Colby had a summer home in Rock Point, Maryland on the banks of the Wicomico River, a tributary of the Potomac. On the cold, blustery night of April 27, 1996, the septuagenarian Colby reportedly went canoeing in the Wicomico River—the winds were gusting at twenty-five miles per hour. “I don’t see why a man his age would be out there,” said a Rock Point neighbor. “If I went out there it would be in a 16- to 20-foot boat—not a canoe.”
Colby’s canoe was spotted the next day on a sand bar, but Colby was nowhere to be found. The US Coast Guard was summoned, and one of its investigators said that Colby had left his radio and computer on when he went canoeing. The investigator also said, “There were dinner items on the table.” It was later reported that Colby’s meal was half eaten, but I’m unsure if that was mere conjecture based upon the Coast Guard investigator’s saying that “dinner items” were on the table.
Colby had phoned his wife earlier in the evening—she was in Texas visiting her mother. I’ve found differing accounts of their conversation: The Associated Press reported that Colby told her he didn’t feel well, but was going canoeing anyway. The Guardian reported that he phoned his wife to say he was going to eat dinner, take a hot shower, and hit the sack. A third newspaper account stated that Colby told his wife he wasn’t feeling well, but it did not state if Colby told his wife he was going canoeing.
The day Colby’s canoe was found, Coast Guard crews started to search the Wicomico for his body. The Coast Guard ultimately scoured the river and banks for eight days with divers, sonar equipment, draglines, and dogs—Colby’s body was not recovered. Then, on May 6, Colby’s body washed ashore close to where his canoe had originally been spotted—it’s odd that Colby’s body materialized so close to the canoe even though the Coast Guard had scoured the vicinity.
The Associated Press reported that Colby’s body was clad in khaki pants, a blue and white shirt, and a red windbreaker, but he wasn’t wearing shoes. So, if the Associated Press account of Colby’s canoeing apparel was accurate, Colby went canoeing on a cold, blustery night without shoes: It was cold enough for him to wear a windbreaker, and yet he opted not to wear shoes.
I’ve discussed Colby’s enigmatic death simply because it is an integral facet of Franklin lore. According to John DeCamp, Colby disclosed to him shortly before his death that he had become disillusioned with the CIA’s use of children for sinister agendas and was determined to make the Agency accountable for its abuses. Colby, a devout Catholic, had certainly bared a number of the CIA’s abuses to the Senate. But he had balked at publicly stating that Caradori’s death was a murder. Ultimately, I am unable to provide a satisfactory explanation for William Colby’s very strange demise.
next
Boys Town
Shortly after graduating from high school in 1967, Caradori was drafted into the United States Coast Guard, and, following basic training at Cape May, New Jersey, he was transferred to Alaska, where his duties included handling teletype messages and directing aircraft. In 1969, the Coast Guard sent the nineteen-year-old Caradori to study anti-submarine warfare at Radarman School on Governors Island, New York.
Caradori spent the next two years abroad on the Coast Guard Cutter Mellon, serving one year in Vietnam. As a 2nd Class Radarman on the Mellon, Caradori demonstrated innate leadership skills, supervising eight men.
After receiving an honorable discharge from the Coast Guard in 1971, Caradori joined the Nebraska State Patrol. He impressed his NSP supervisors with his leadership qualities and instinctive investigative talents, and they promptly placed him in charge of one of the state’s six Mobile Crime Evidence Vans. At the age of 23, Caradori transferred to the NSP’s Criminal Division, one of the youngest men ever to have been appointed an NSP Investigator. There he refined his investigative skills by enrolling in numerous FBI-sponsored training curricula, including Snipers, Bomb Threats and Hostage School, Criminal Investigation Photo Lab School, and Sex Crime Investigation.
Caradori possessed a strong entrepreneurial spirit, and he left the NSP in “good standing” in March 1977 to become the co-proprietor of JC Security and Detective Agency. Four years later, he formed a second partnership: Caradori/Weatherl Investigations. In February 1989, the industrious Caradori underwent a final entrepreneurial incarnation, becoming the founder of Caracorp, which landed investigative contracts from a number of corporate powerhouses—ConAgra, Cargill, and Archer Daniels Midland. Caradori was clearly a man on the escalator of upward mobility.
According to Caradori, Senator Loran Schmit made an unannounced visit to the offices of Caracorp on an August afternoon in 1989. Caradori felt that the senator was “lucky” to catch him, because stationary days at the office were a rarity for him: He was usually in perpetual motion, traveling in excess of 150,000 miles a year. Caradori assumed his usual seat behind his cherry wood roll-top desk, and Schmit seated himself in one of the well-padded leather chairs facing it. Both men were licensed pilots, and Caradori later said that Schmit broke the ice by discussing airplanes and other generalities before broaching the subject of Franklin. Caradori had spent nine of the previous twelve months working around the country, and he wasn’t familiar with the particulars of Franklin—Caradori initially thought that the Franklin Credit Union was just “another bank that went under.”
At the conclusion of Schmit and Caradori’s initial meeting, Caradori was invited to meet with the entire Franklin Committee the following week at the statehouse. After the Committee members interviewed Caradori for two hours, he left the room while they voted on his appointment. He was then ushered back before the Committee, and they informed him that he had been retained as their new investigator. Though Caradori had the razor-sharp street smarts of an extraordinary detective, it would take him weeks before he realized the full scope and malevolence of the corruption he was investigating.
On August 21, Caradori plunged into the Franklin investigation with his usual tenacity and zeal. His initial foray included devouring the reports and memos generated by Jerry Lowe and all the previous documentation and testimony collected by the Franklin Committee. Whereas Lowe had conducted an investigation of the federal and state investigations, Caradori was committed to carrying out his own investigation. Early on, Caradori received a call from a friend who was an OPD lieutenant—his friend cautioned him of the looming danger ahead, saying that the sexual component of Franklin had been covered up from the start.
Caradori assigned Karen Ormiston to be his principal assistant in the investigation. A trusted employee of Caradori’s for over six years, she was Caracorp’s office coordinator and business manager. Together they had complementary investigative styles that paralleled the choreography of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers: Caradori would lead, gathering extensive evidence in a whirlwind of intensity; Ormiston would follow up, collating and processing the evidence.
From the onset of the investigation, several obstacles confronted Caradori and his staff. Many of Caradori’s “Investigative Reports” from August and September note that he faced the formidable barriers of “distrust” and a pall of fear as he attempted to cultivate confidential informants or simply interview individuals who had previously volunteered information—they suspected that the Franklin Committee was merely serving the function of a continuing cover-up. Moreover, they feared that divulging specific or personal information would be a surefire way to blow their anonymity, because their disclosures would inevitably be published in the World-Herald. Caradori quickly came to the realization that it was imperative to nurture the withering civic trust; so he sent a September memo to the Franklin Committee, insisting it was “crucial” that nothing be published implicating specific individuals until his investigation was completed.
In addition to widespread distrust, Caradori also encountered enemies he hadn’t anticipated. Caradori’s wife, Sandi, a middle school English teacher, informed me that a family friend confirmed a troubling hunch of her husband’s. “An old friend of ours who used to work for Lincoln Telephone came to our house and told us that our phones were tapped,” she said. “Gary already suspected it was the FBI, because when he arranged meetings over the phone FBI agents would already be at the designated place when he arrived.”
Ormiston also felt that her phones were tapped, prompting Caradori to send a letter to Lincoln Telephone, requesting that the company provide him with information concerning their lines being tapped or monitored. After a Lincoln Telephone representative received the letter, he phoned Caradori and relayed that the information he requested required a court order or a subpoena. According to Ormiston, a subpoena was served on Lincoln Telephone, but the company refused to honor it.
The vast majority of today’s US telephone exchanges employ digital technology, which enables telephone monitoring to be conducted from remote distances. In 1989, however, the monitoring connection generally had to be applied directly to the line of the phone being tapped, and the wiretaps occasionally resulted in telephonic glitches for the monitored individual—Ormiston related an anecdote about a telephone snafu at Caracorp.
“When our office phones started malfunctioning,” she commented, “Gary contacted his friend at Lincoln Telephone who stopped by our office. After he fidgeted with our jacks for a few minutes, he electronically zeroed in on a room where we heard people talking. They eventually realized that their jack was open and suddenly cut it off.”
In addition to tapped phones, Caradori had to start dealing with home intruders. On September 14, 1989, while Caradori and his wife were out with friends and their two sons were at home sleeping, someone entered their home around 10:00 P.M. The Caradori’s oldest son was alerted to the trespasser by the family’s dogs, and then he heard a door being opened and closed. Caradori filed a trespassing report with the Lincoln Police Department—the intruder was never apprehended.
In newspaper reportage of Caradori’s derring-do adventures, he discussed the investigative necessity of nurturing a network of contacts and informants, and he quickly incorporated that modus operandi into his Franklin investigation. Within weeks of commencing the investigation, his records confirm that he had several meetings with “confidential informants.” He also started zigzagging the streets and bars of Omaha to cultivate additional informants. The street buzz was rife with rumors corroborating Larry King’s abuse of children and enabled Caradori to identify other perpetrators. At this point in the investigation, it wasn’t uncommon for Caradori to log over one-hundred-hour weeks, talking to scores of unsavory individuals in sordid, nocturnal haunts. Sandi Caradori told me that her husband started taking long, hot showers to relax physically, and seemingly cleanse the investigation’s dark residue from his soul.
Caradori scrambled for leads on the streets and from informants, and also adhered to the Watergate refrain of following the money—two investigative techniques that are not mutually exclusive. To follow the money, Caradori originally received help from the NCUA. After Franklin was closed, the NCUA had set up a “reconstruction office” in Omaha to decipher the whereabouts of the missing $40 million. The stacked boxes there contained thousands of checks, invoices, receipts, etc.
The NCUA initially granted Caradori and Ormiston access to the reconstruction office during normal business hours Monday through Friday, and they were allowed to make copies of documentation they deemed relevant to their investigation. A ranking NCUA official in Washington, DC also provided Caradori with leads.
At the NCUA reconstruction office, Caradori and Ormiston managed to find boxes containing scores of receipts from various air charter services. The flight receipts rarely listed passengers, or would merely list “Larry King.” The receipts also revealed that King charted Lear jets on an almost weekly basis. Though King jetted to numerous locations throughout the country, his favored destination was Washington, DC.
The flight receipts presented Caradori with a fresh avenue of investigation that he maneuvered with his customary doggedness. A September Investigative Report indicated that Caradori contacted a charter service in Columbus, Ohio repeatedly used by King, but the company’s lawyer rebuffed his request for flight records, demanding a subpoena. Unfortunately, the Franklin Committee’s subpoena power had no standing outside the borders of Nebraska.
In October 1989, Caradori made contact with the pilot of a second charter service frequented by King. The pilot informed Caradori that he had piloted King, two teenage boys, and a teenage girl to Los Angeles. Caradori phoned another pilot from the same charter service who acknowledged that minors accompanied King on flights.
In a later Investigative Report, Caradori described his meeting with a former employee of a third charter service used by King. Though the woman was apprehensive about having her name connected to the “Franklin investigation,” she disclosed that King used her charter service on a weekly basis. She said he routinely traveled with a number of young men: “very good looking,” dressed in fancy suits, and “clean cut and clean shaven.” The young men, she remarked, never spoke, which she found strange.
Caradori and Ormiston called on a fourth charter service patronized by King located in Sioux City, Iowa. They met with the company’s chief executive, who instructed his secretary to direct them to a basement room where their records were stored— Caradori and Ormiston then began to burrow through the company’s countless records. Caradori must have felt like a miner striking gold when he found Franklin Credit Union itineraries listing children whose names had surfaced during his investigation. As Caradori continued to burrow, Ormiston snatched the itineraries and darted to a nearby copy machine. While Caradori scanned the itineraries, he came across one that had a sticker on it denoting a previous FBI inquiry.
When Caradori and Ormiston were on the verge of leaving the charter service with their newfound cache, the company’s chief executive barged into the room and demanded that they leave without the copied itineraries. Caradori grudgingly acquiesced to abandoning the itineraries, but they were a sterling lead that his tenacious disposition was disinclined to relinquish without a fight. Because the Franklin Committee’s subpoenas lacked authority in Iowa, he phoned his NCUA contact in DC and implored him to authorize a federal subpoena for the company’s flight itineraries. The NCUA official consented to subpoena the charter service’s records.
As Caradori awaited the prized itineraries, he was slapped with a federal subpoena that demanded he surrender Franklin evidence to the FBI. Caradori found the subpoena to be particularly vexing, because the Committee routinely surrendered its evidence to state and federal authorities. He nonetheless complied with the subpoena and delivered a bundle of files to Omaha’s FBI headquarters.
He glanced at the desk of the FBI agent receiving the files, and he noticed a stack of documents from the charter service in Sioux City, Iowa. Weeks later, Caradori walked into Senator Schmit’s office at the statehouse—Schmit was talking on the phone but handed him a large envelope containing the subpoenaed itineraries. Caradori leafed through the itineraries and quickly realized that they had been altered—all the incriminating information relating to the interstate transportation of children had been deleted.
At the onset of an investigation, first-rate investigators make few, if any, assumptions as they’re stalking their initial leads. And Caradori’s earliest forays into Franklin resulted in his treading metaphorical avenues and alleyways that were fruitful, fallow, or downright bizarre, and his interactions with Michael Casey would encompass all three. In the role of a “freelance journalist,” Casey had been delving into Franklin for months, scouring Omaha’s seedy underside, accruing contacts and tantalizing tidbits. In fact, he co-authored that early, relatively superficial article about Franklin in the Village Voice in February 1989.
Casey had a talent for blarney and drinking vast quantities of liquor, two talents that often accompany and complement each other. In a testament to Casey’s gift of blarney, he reportedly convinced the Los Angeles Times that he had the underworld connections to locate then-fugitive Patty Hearst, and the paper bankrolled his ill fated high jinks. Casey also had a talent for absconding with the money of concerned Nebraska citizens and compelling them to give him shelter. He even talked the NSP into footing the bill for a motel, where he freely availed himself of movie rentals. According to the NSP, Casey had a long rap sheet, which included forgery, credit card fraud, and alcohol-related driving infractions, resulting in various convictions and incarcerations.
Caradori first became aware of Casey from one of Jerry Lowe’s reports, and he found Casey crashing at the home of an Omaha talk radio personality. Caradori and Ormiston visited the latter’s home and talked to both Casey and his host—Casey’s Franklin materials were displayed throughout the living room. The radio personality would become disillusioned with Casey after a month or so and give him the boot. After Casey’s departure, an employee of the phone company visited the radio personality’s home and told him his home phones had been tapped, too.
Because of Casey’s ability to spin convincing yet contradictory yarns, his sketchy history is a complex tapestry of truth and falsehoods and, perhaps, grand intentions yet destructive actions. In 1974, after a stint in prison, Casey briefly served as Boys Town’s “special projects director,” but according to the World-Herald, he was fired for taking the confidential case histories of residents and sending the files to MGM in an effort to sell a television series based on the orphanage. Though Casey claimed that Boys Town had given him permission to take the files, Father Hupp emphatically stated that permission was never granted. Hupp said Casey picketed the main gate at Boys Town to protest his termination.
Given Casey’s dodgy history, Caradori’s cultivation of him as a source may seem questionable, but Casey allegedly had information to offer: Casey initially told Caradori that he had access to a videotape showing Larry King engaged in sexual acts with children and had also conducted an audiotape interview with a former Boys Town student who discussed being molested by Peter Citron, an Omaha World-Herald columnist and one of the prominent Nebraskans whom Caradori’s early sources had tied to King’s pandering network. Caradori concluded that the videotape never existed, but he quickly acquired the audiotape of the Boys Town student.
In the interview, the Boys Town student, who was then a senior, told Casey that he met Citron on the Boys Town campus, where Citron was reporting on the filming of a movie about Boys Town—Miracle of the Heart. The Boys Town student said that he was fifteen years old when Citron molested him. He maintained that their association lasted three months and that he visited Citron’s home on numerous occasions. The student said he initially didn’t report Citron to Boys Town staff, but came forward a year later when he became aware that Citron was preying on a second Boys Town student. Though the student talked to Boys Town staff and an OPD officer regarding the molestation, nothing ever came of his allegations. In fact, he spotted Citron on the Boys Town campus even after he had given his information to Boys Town staff.
Caradori’s Investigative Reports noted that he made an assiduous effort to talk to the former Boys Town student whom Casey interviewed. After they exchanged a number of phone calls, he finally agreed to meet Caradori. When Caradori and Ormiston showed up at his apartment at the agreed upon time, he was nowhere to be found. But four days later Caradori finally managed to have a face-to-face meeting with the former student.
The young man was ambivalent about granting Caradori a formal interview, because he didn’t want his name in the newspaper, and, strangely enough, he was concerned about his disclosures sullying Boys Town’s reputation. He told Caradori and Ormiston that he had to give some thought to making a formal statement. Approximately two weeks later he consented to meet with Caradori and Ormiston, but, again, he stood them up. Caradori would eventually receive a phone call from the young man’s sister—she relayed to him that her brother was “extremely scared” to talk because the FBI and NSP had been “harassing” him. [The Gestapo being passed off as an FBI here in America needs to go, like yesterday,corrupt,inept, do not even begin to cover it DC]
In addition to acquiring Casey’s interview, Caradori spent a handful of nights rummaging the streets and bars with Casey, but he wrote he found Casey’s drunkenness counterproductive to forging further leads. In the second week of September, Caradori made his final throw of the dice with Casey, and it revolved around Franklin’s Rosetta Stone: pictures of King and company engaged in sexual acts with children. Casey had fostered a tenuous relationship with one of the photographers employed by King, and Casey claimed he could score illicit pictures for $300. Though Caradori was dubious, his notes make clear he felt risking $300 for the possibility, albeit scant, of acquiring visual proof of King’s illicit acts would be acceptable. Casey never came through with the photographs, and Caradori completely disengaged from him. Nebraska law enforcement later accused Caradori of naïveté and of being “duped” by Casey, but the NSP had accommodated Casey in a hotel for three nights and four days, and it hadn’t even acquired his audiotape of the Boys Town student.
Caradori had a final, curt encounter with Casey at the Cornhusker Hotel in Lincoln on the morning of November 25, 1989. Caradori received a message from a man lodging at the Cornhusker—he returned the call and the man requested to meet with Caradori concerning a prospective assignment. Caradori told him that he would be driving from Lincoln to Omaha that morning and consented to stop by the Cornhusker at 8:00 A.M. When Caradori arrived at the hotel, he was directed to a suite. The man answering the suite’s door introduced himself, and then disclosed that he was a Hollywood producer who was working with Casey on a cinematic treatment of the Franklin story. Following their cursory introduction, Casey walked into the room from an adjoining room. Caradori expressed his irritation to Casey over the $300-picture fiasco and brought the meeting to an abrupt conclusion.
Caradori’s contract with the Committee forbade him to discuss the Franklin investigation with publishers and producers, and shortly after his impasse at the Cornhusker, he phoned Committee counsel Berry and explained the circumstances surrounding his “meeting” with the Hollywood producer and Casey. If this had been a typical investigation, Michael Casey would be merely a handful of footnotes in Caradori’s efforts, because Caradori labored incessantly for a year, amassing thousands of leads and interviewing hundreds of individuals. But this wasn’t a typical investigation, and Casey’s role in the “official” account of the affair would significantly eclipse Caradori’s.
On September 22, 1989, a Douglas County judge had imposed a three-to-four-year sentence on the twenty-one-year-old Alisha Owen for two “bad check” convictions: The respective amounts of the two checks were $378.04 and $358.92. A sentence of three to four years for checks totaling $736.96 would only be the beginning of Owen’s bizarre odyssey through the Douglas County judiciary—an odyssey that is perhaps unparalleled in American history.
Casey had met Owen earlier, when both were patients at Omaha’s St. Joseph Hospital’s psychiatric ward. Owen had been admitted for “depression” in September 1988—Casey later boasted to a friend that he feigned a psychiatric illness to cultivate a friendship with Owen at St. Joseph’s. Casey, however, had a long history of alcohol abuse, and individuals who abuse alcohol and other substances frequently opt to dry out in psychiatric hospitals. If Casey had admitted himself to St. Joseph’s solely for the purpose of developing a friendship with Owen, it’s rather odd that he didn’t leave until about a week after Owen’s discharge from St. Joseph’s.
Psychiatric patients who aren’t in the throes of psychosis, like Owen and Casey, have a tendency to congregate, forming bonds that last throughout the course of their hospitalization and perhaps afterward, but Owen contends that her interactions with Casey were limited. Upon her discharge, though, she did give Casey the phone number of her parents’ home in Omaha.
Owen was harboring secrets, and she thought that revealing those secrets would jeopardize the welfare of herself and her family—she was resolved to divulge her secrets to no one, including Casey and St. Joseph’s personnel. But Owen’s secrets were severely straining her emotional well-being, and she attempted suicide two weeks after her psychiatric discharge, landing in St. Joseph’s for a second time.
In addition to being extremely troubled, Owen had a bench warrant pending for bad-check charges. Law enforcement initially requested a hold on Owen, but then inexplicably dropped the arrest warrant, perplexing St. Joseph’s personnel. After Owen’s second discharge from St. Joseph’s, she continued to live at her parents’ house, even though she felt her secrets were imperiling her family.
Casey phoned Owen at her parents’ home following her second hospitalization. He was freeloading at a friend’s house and offered her its vacant studio apartment. She accepted his offer but only slept in the apartment for a handful of nights. Owen quickly concluded that residing in the studio would be potentially hazardous to her health—the homeowner was an associate of Alan Baer, a prominent Omaha millionaire whom Caradori would link to King’s pandering network.
Since Casey initially met Owen at St. Joseph’s, the Franklin Credit Union had been raided and sordid insinuations were surfacing—Casey had taken a budding interest in the Franklin scandal and questioned Owen because of her evident familiarity with Omaha’s gay community. Owen told me that her brief stay with Casey was the first and only time they ever discussed Franklin, emphasizing that she never revealed her involvement to him.
However, she felt grateful to Casey for providing her with shelter and tossed out two names—Troy Boner and Danny King—stating that they were enmeshed in Franklin. Owen felt confident that Casey would never find Boner or King, and she was right: Casey never made contact with either one.
Within two or three weeks of departing Casey’s friend’s digs, Owen and a young man she met at St. Joseph’s would fall in love and flee Nebraska. He wrote a slew of bad checks, purchased a car, and they embarked on a cross-country trek. Their love fest came to a screeching halt in Greeley, Colorado.
They had run out of money and started writing bad checks. The couple then had a domestic spat, and Owen landed in Weld County Jail. As Alisha Owen languished in the Colorado jail, she would be arraigned for six bad checks, totaling $582.63. The twenty-year-old Owen, overwhelmed and demoralized, phoned her parents. Owen’s mother, Donna, then contacted the OPD and informed an officer about her daughter’s circumstances in Colorado, but, to her utter astonishment, the officer phoned a week later and said Nebraska wouldn’t extradite her daughter, even though Colorado had consented to her extradition.
When Owen was released from the Weld County Jail in the middle of May, her parents provided her with a one-way bus ticket to Omaha. Owen chose not to reside at her parents’ home when she arrived in Omaha, perplexing them. She decided to take refuge with a grade school friend—the two had limited contact in recent years, and Owen thought she might have a measure of invisibility at her friend’s. In early July, Owen’s mother received a call from the OPD—she was instructed to transport her daughter to OPD headquarters. Because Nebraska had elected earlier not to extradite Owen, her mother was confounded when Douglas County opted to incarcerate her.
By July 1989, Douglas County’s law enforcement and its judiciary had already started to display a puzzling schizophrenia concerning Owen. When she was hospitalized at St. Joseph’s, law enforcement requested a hold on her because of outstanding warrants but later dropped the hold. In May, Owen’s mother was informed that she wouldn’t be extradited to Nebraska; yet after she voluntarily returned to Omaha, a judge’s directive that gave her the option of making bail was disregarded. Moreover, she would eventually receive three to fours years in the Nebraska Facility for Women at York for bouncing two checks that totaled a whopping $736.96.
Caradori later said that “Alisha Owen” was just one of numerous names he had scribbled on a “scratch pad” while talking with Michael Casey, and he had no idea whether she was a hot lead or a dead end. His Investigative Reports indicate that he initially contacted personnel at the Nebraska Facility for Women at York on October 11, 1989, but nearly three weeks elapsed before he made the trek to York, which illustrates that he consigned Owen to the status of a low priority lead. If Caradori had thought Owen was a surefire lead, he likely would have made a beeline to York.
On Monday, October 30, Caradori and Ormiston arrived at York around 7:00 P.M. Earlier that afternoon, Caradori had phoned the Associate Warden and requested to meet Owen in a location that offered a modicum of privacy, and prison personnel escorted Caradori and Ormiston to a conference room in the prison basement. Their day had been consumed chasing charter-service leads, and they were exhausted.
A pair of guards then ushered Owen into the room, and Caradori and Ormiston introduced themselves to her. Owen stood 5’4” and weighed 150 pounds in her brown state-issued prison garb. She had a thick mane of curly brown hair and hazel eyes. Her rounded face, tentative voice, and mannerisms had the qualities of a timid teenager, even though she had turned twenty-one the month before, and her adolescence had been a detour to her own private hell.
Though Caradori was gracious to Owen, he quickly cut to the chase. She was initially hesitant to discuss her past, but Caradori and Ormiston conveyed an integrity that allayed her suspicions and fears. Over the course of the next three hours, she confessed to her involvement in illicit acts, and specified perpetrators whose names had repeatedly surfaced throughout Caradori’s investigation. At the conclusion of the interview, Caradori asked Owen if she would be willing to make a formal statement the following week. Owen said she needed to sound out her parents, because she felt that her cooperation would potentially endanger members of her family.
After Owen discussed her past with Caradori and Ormiston on Monday night, she was plagued by nightmares for two nights. On Wednesday, she requested a psychiatric consult—she felt that patient confidentiality statutes permitted her to safely disclose her Franklin participation to the prison’s psychiatrist. When she entered the psychiatrist’s office, she insisted that he turn off his tape recorder and not take notes. Once he acquiesced to her requests, and assured her of his confidentiality, she opened up. The psychiatrist, taken aback, insisted that Owen discuss her situation with the warden. Owen subsequently set out for the warden’s office, and, after the warden granted her the same assurances as the psychiatrist, she told him about her history and her dilemma of whether or not she should grant Caradori a formal interview.
A memo from York’s warden to the Nebraska Attorney General’s Office corroborated Owen’s account of her visit to the prison’s psychiatrist and then to the warden. The warden wrote that on the morning of November 1, 1989, he was “advised” by York’s psychiatrist that he “needed” to talk to inmate Owen. The warden inquired about the nature of the psychiatrist’s concerns, but he wouldn’t disclose the content of their conversation.
Owen, the warden continued, explained to him “she had been a witness and victim of child abuse and numerous other illegal activities by … suspects in the Franklin Credit Union investigation.” Owen told the warden that the suspects in the investigation had “considerable power and influence,” and she had anxiety about her safety at the prison—she also said their authority might “extend into the prison and possibly affect” the warden. The warden assured Owen that he was “not at all inclined to be receptive to bribes,” and he noted that Owen “seemed to be accepting of that sentiment and expressed relief that she had talked with me about her problems.”
Later in the week, Owen’s mother and father visited her at York—Owen and her mother then took a walk in the prison’s yard. Owen told her mother that she was personally mixed up in sordid events now coming to light. Her mother inquired if she had direct knowledge of child abuse, and she replied that she had been one of the abused. Though Owen’s mother was dumbfounded by her daughter’s disclosures, she finally had an explanation of her daughter’s peculiar behavior, starting at the age of fourteen. As Owen and her mother cried, her mother asked her daughter why she hadn’t come to her parents for help. Owen said that even though the perpetrators were too powerful for her parents to challenge, she knew they would never have backed down—she was convinced her parents would have been murdered.
Alisha Owen phoned Caradori on November 4 and consented to be interviewed. Caradori copied a myriad of pictures, including those of the alleged perpetrators, and a lawyer from Berry’s law firm drafted a “waiver” to be signed by Owen and Caradori and notarized by Ormiston, a notary public. The waiver clearly stated that Owen’s statements were made freely and voluntarily without promises or threats. Moreover, she was under oath during her statement and would be subject to prosecution for perjured statements. The waiver also denoted that Caradori did not have the authority to grant immunity. On the morning of November 7, Caradori and Ormiston arrived at York and started videotaping Owen’s statement around 11:30 A.M. After a series of respites and breaks, they finished at 10:00 P.M.
Owen came from a deeply religious family. Her parents, Al and Donna, had been married nearly twenty-five years, and Al was the proprietor of a modest construction company. Al and Donna had four kids—Alisha was the second oldest. Owen’s parents enrolled her in a strict parochial school which she attended from kindergarten through sixth grade—she entered public school in seventh grade. At the age of thirteen or so Owen started developing a rebellious streak. It’s not uncommon for teenagers from religious homes to rebel and run with the “wrong crowd,” but unfortunately Owen wasn’t streetwise enough to distinguish the wrong crowd from an evil horde.
Owen told Caradori and Ormiston that she was fourteen years old when she allegedly met a group of Boys Town students, including Jeff Hubbell, at an outdoor dance in August of 1983—Hubbell invited Owen to a party the following Friday night. She said Hubbell declared that the party would be a flood of alcohol and a blizzard of cocaine. On Friday night, Hubbell and a “friend” picked up Owen and drove her to the Twin Towers. They arrived at the party between 9:30 P.M. and 10:00 P.M.
The Twin Towers apartment and the party were a world removed from Owen’s working-class background and prior life experiences. The living room had a fully stocked bar, plush furniture, and a big screen television—a pornographic movie, featuring two adolescent males, spilled from the television. Lines of cocaine were splayed on a mirrored table next to a maroon couch, and the living room’s large windows offered a spectacular nightscape of downtown Omaha. The party consisted of six adults and twenty minors. At the time, Owen said, she didn’t have a clue about the identities of the adults—she would later learn they included Larry King and Alan Baer. She was also introduced to an older man named “Rob.”
Though Owen felt uncomfortable, she also said she felt a sense of exhilaration and sophistication. She did cocaine for the first time and was even allowed to “play bartender”—she became increasingly intoxicated. The adults then watched the minors play the “501 game,” which involved the minors unbuttoning each other’s jeans with their teeth and toes. Owen made it clear to Caradori and Ormiston that she didn’t partake in explicit sexual acts at the first party, even though she observed adults fondling minors and noticed some of the adults and minors shuffling in and out of the bedrooms. Owen didn’t make it home until 1:30 A.M.—her curfew was 12:30 A.M. She received a scolding from her mother but wasn’t grounded.
Over the next three or four days, Owen attempted to sort out her Friday night at the Twin Towers. She had previously fooled around with alcohol here and there, and also fooled around with guys to the point of heavy petting, but the party at the Twin Towers was far afield from her previous acts of rebellion, and she felt conflicted. As Owen struggled to make sense of this new reality, Troy Boner, a boy she met at the party, phoned her and talked about the great time they had.
His call ultimately convinced her to attend her second Twin Towers party the following Friday night. She asked her parents if she could spend Friday night at a girlfriend’s house and they consented—Owen’s parents would later discover that her friend’s mother was very lax about curfews. In addition to King, Baer, and Rob, she said World-Herald columnist Peter Citron attended the party. Owen became extremely intoxicated, drinking champagne and shots of cognac, as the kids played the “501 game.” She stood up and stumbled to the bathroom—she said she accidentally entered one of the bedrooms and saw a pubescent boy performing oral sex on Larry King.
At one point, Owen alleges, Rob asked her to undo his pants zipper with her teeth. Owen balked at Rob’s request, and she was teased and taunted for being a “little girl.” After succumbing to the taunts, she knelt before Rob, who placed a cushion under her knees so she could reach his groin. Owen told Caradori and Ormiston that quiet fell over the room as everyone watched to see if she could unzip Rob’s fly with her teeth. As she managed to unzip Rob’s pants, he ran his fingers through her hair. Owen said that Rob then sat in a chair, holding a glass of cognac, and invited her to sit on his lap. She sat on his lap, and he caressed her breasts and thighs— Owen thought Rob was “really nice.” After Rob left the party, an inebriated Owen lost her virginity to Troy Boner. In retrospect, Owen thought she was “supposed” to lose her virginity that night so she would then be sexually accessible to the group.
Owen told Caradori and Ormiston that she attended her third party at the Twin Towers three weeks later, and Rob showed up about an hour after she arrived—she felt that Rob had probably been called when she arrived. The gathering that night was sparse—adults and kids trickled into the bedrooms, leaving Owen and Rob alone in the living room. Owen was wearing a leather jumpsuit that was “ten years too old” for her, and Rob maneuvered her onto his lap. He said that she was pretty and indicated to Owen that he knew she had lost her virginity; he felt her breasts and genitalia. Rob asked Owen if her parents knew she was no longer a virgin—she felt mortified by his question because she thought that he might tell her parents about her promiscuity.
Owen said that Rob started unzipping her jumpsuit, and she implored him to stop, but he clenched her wrist and twisted it. As Rob removed her clothing, he continued talking—he whispered that she had a “pretty” mouth and then inquired if she knew the meaning of “fellatio.” After Rob had her repeatedly say “fellatio,” he said he would teach her the word’s meaning. When she was nude, he stood up, put a cushion under her knees, and told her to unzip his pants. She unzipped his fly, and then he grabbed her head and had her perform oral sex on him—he also pinched her breasts. After the act, she ran to the bathroom, vomited, and began to cry.
She emerged from the bathroom crying, and Rob gave her a gentle hug and expressed to her that he was sorry. As Rob comforted her, he said that he would take her to lunch on Wednesday afternoon. He also instructed her to pick out a dress at the downtown department store owned by Alan Baer on Monday and put it on “hold.” Owen was given a ride home that night by a couple of the party’s attendees, and one stated that Rob was the Chief of the Omaha Police Department—she instantly feared that Rob would tell her parents about their encounter.
As Owen talked about her “relationship” with OPD Chief Robert Wadman to Caradori and Ormiston, she occasionally stared at the floor and also broke down in tears. At one point, she burst out crying and Caradori briefly stopped the interview. When the interview proceeded, Owen said that on the following Monday, after school, she had wandered to Alan Baer’s department store and found a dress that she liked, filled out a receipt, and gave it to the clerk, whom she described as a fifty-year-old woman with glasses and dyed auburn hair. Caradori asked her a number of questions about the dress: She replied that it was a size ten, “black, lace dress” and cost $115.
Owen told Caradori and Ormiston that Wadman picked her up across the street from Central High School on Wednesday at 1:00 P.M. in a brown compact car. He drove her to the chic French Café in downtown Omaha—Owen disclosed that the Café’s owners and hostess frequented King’s parties. She said that the French Café was generally closed in the afternoons, but the hostess guided her and Wadman to one of the Café’s small side rooms. Once they were seated at a table, she said, Wadman handed her a wrapped package that contained the dress she had picked out on Monday, and then they ordered lunch.
Owen ordered a crepe dish that she didn’t like and just picked at it. After lunch, Owen said, Wadman offered to show her the café’s wine cellar, and she followed him through the kitchen and down a stairway to the left—she told Caradori and Ormiston that the basement was “rickety and yucky” and there wasn’t a wine cellar. Owen uttered that she was afraid of being raped—she “tried to think of anything else but what was happening” as she gazed at the basement ceiling’s molding.
Wadman, Owen continued, requested that she put the dress on in front of him. She initially balked at undressing, but he said that she had a beautiful body and she didn’t have to be ashamed. She also felt like a “heel” for not immediately acquiescing to his request, because the dress was so expensive. As she disrobed and started slipping into the dress, she recalled, Wadman caressed her breasts, pulled down his pants and started to masturbate. Owen told Caradori and Ormiston that Wadman wanted to ejaculate on her, but she jumped back—Wadman was incensed that she had recoiled.
Owen said that she attended a Twin Towers party two weeks later and Wadman eventually showed up. She was afraid of him and started to leave, but Larry King’s enforcer, also named Larry, a muscular African American in his early twenties, said, “You’re not leaving!”—Owen didn’t know his last name and called him “Larry the Kid.”
Owen quickly found herself in over her head—she worried about retribution against her family, and she understandably felt she couldn’t turn to the police for help. Larry the Kid and Larry King repeatedly terrorized Owen by threatening her life and the lives of her family members—Larry the Kid occasionally slapped Owen around and raped her. She stressed that her fear of retribution was very real—she had heard of kids who were either sold or murdered. The threats were counterbalanced by financial rewards: Owen regularly received funds as a drug courier.
Owen said she began to meet Wadman on sporadic Wednesday afternoons, engage in group sexual encounters, and also flew with King to Los Angeles and Kansas City to be pandered as an underage prostitute—Owen described extremely sadistic abuse on the out-of-town trips.
Owen also discussed the circumstances of her incarceration with Caradori and Ormiston. Shortly before the Franklin Credit Union was raided, she said, Larry King and Alan Baer insisted that Owen and Boner relocate to California—Owen and Boner had become lovers and were living together. They were now too old to be pandered to King’s pedophilic clientele, and their detailed knowledge of the network posed a significant risk with the potential heat that might follow the Franklin raid.
Boner had Owen write a flurry of checks to feed his cocaine habit, and Baer agreed to cover the checks when they left for California. Owen, however, began to distrust Boner, and she worried that a trip to California might be the pretext for her ending up in a body bag. She decided not to leave Nebraska; so Baer pulled the plug on his financial support, resulting in an avalanche of bounced checks. Her intuition not to trust Boner would prove to be well founded.
Caradori and Ormiston interviewed Owen on two other occasions. After Caradori videotaped Owen for a second time on November 21, he started to search for Troy Boner. On November 24, Caradori located Boner’s mother, who was living in Council Bluffs, Iowa, a short jaunt from Omaha across the Missouri River. She worked nights as a nurse, and Caradori and Ormiston waited until roughly 8:00 P.M. before they knocked on her front door. They introduced themselves, and Boner’s mother eventually invited them into her kitchen, where an hour-long discussion ensued. She said that her son routinely bounced between California and Omaha, and she would contact him on Caradori’s behalf. She also mentioned that she felt her son was “carrying a great weight on his shoulders” that he refused to discuss with her.
Later that night, Caradori met with a confidential informant in Omaha who disclosed the names of Boys Town students who were allegedly involved with Larry King. After their meeting, he drove home to Lincoln, arriving early Sunday morning. At 4:40 A.M., Caracorp’s answering service directed a call from Troy Boner to Caradori’s home. An exhausted Caradori and Boner spoke for nearly an hour. A seemingly paranoid Boner fired questions at Caradori non-stop.
He initially asked if Caradori had any affiliations with law enforcement—Caradori replied that he was employed by the Franklin Committee and that he had no affiliations with state or federal law enforcement. Boner inquired who had informed Caradori about him—Caradori replied that he received the information from an inmate in a correctional facility, but didn’t reveal his source to be Alisha Owen. Boner then divulged to Caradori that he had, in fact, suffered abuse, and it had left him deeply scarred emotionally. Caradori insisted that they not discuss his circumstances over the phone, and Boner consented to meet Caradori at Boner’s mother’s house in Council Bluffs the following night at 6:00 P.M.
Boner called Caradori back approximately ten minutes after their initial conversation. He had phoned the Lincoln Police Department, and the officer fielding his call stated that the department didn’t employ Caradori. Boner said he felt “satisfied” that Caradori wasn’t a cop and, again, consented to their meeting. Boner then phoned Caradori at 8:00 A.M. and indicated they could meet that morning—they agreed to meet at a Denny’s Restaurant in Bellevue, Nebraska at 10:30 A.M.
As Caradori and Ormiston waited for Boner in the Denny’s parking lot, he pulled up in a green Gran Torino that was driven by his mother’s boyfriend. The twenty two-year-old Boner cautiously emerged from the car and shook hands with Caradori and Ormiston. Boner, 6’3”, weighing 200 pounds, wore a patent leather jacket, a T shirt, and designer jeans—his T-shirt had a silk-screen of The Cure’s Love Song album.
Boner was noticeably agitated, and the restaurant was too congested to confer a feeling of privacy, so Caradori suggested one nearby. Boner rode with Caradori and Ormiston, but he had his mother’s boyfriend tail them. His mother’s boyfriend hung out in the parking lot as Boner, Caradori, and Ormiston entered the second restaurant. The three situated themselves around a table and talked in “generalities” for five or ten minutes before Caradori dropped a succession of details that were designed to convey that his information was “on target.” After half an hour, Boner decided to grant Caradori a formal, videotaped statement.
When they departed the restaurant, they proceeded to the home of his mother’s boyfriend, where Boner and his fiancée were living. Boner packed a week’s worth of clothes, and told his fiancée and his mother’s boyfriend that he was accompanying Caradori and Ormiston to Lincoln. Boner’s fiancée seemed to understand the import of his decision, but his mother’s boyfriend was uncomfortable. Caradori pledged that Boner would be safe, and he handed his mother’s boyfriend a business card, assuring him that either he or Boner’s mother could phone him anytime.
Driving to Lincoln, Caradori would find out that Boner and Owen came from very different backgrounds: Boner’s father had spent years in prison for various offenses, and he didn’t have the intact nuclear family of Owen. Though Boner’s father had been absent from the family for years, his mother and grandmother still managed to impart a sense of family to Boner and his siblings. Troy was the oldest of four children.
Caradori, Ormiston, and Boner made the hour trek from Omaha to Lincoln and stopped at a Residence Inn. Caradori left Ormiston and Boner in the hotel room and made a foray to pick up pizza and videotapes. After eating, Ormiston read the waiver prepared by Berry’s law firm—it was then signed by Boner and Caradori and notarized by Ormiston. Caradori and Ormiston interviewed Boner from 3:35 P.M. until 10:22 P.M., taking breaks and respites. The next morning Boner was interviewed for an additional two hours.
During Boner’s videotaped statements, he corroborated Owen’s information on numerous perpetrators and many events. Caradori also noted a number of discrepancies concerning the dates and precise locations of the events they mentioned. Owen had admitted to drug and alcohol abuse during her teenage years, and Boner was a self-confessed drug addict. Caradori felt that their years of incessant sexual abuse and their drug-addled memories made it extremely difficult for them to recall the precise dates and locations of events that had transpired years earlier, whereas the events themselves would have been easier to remember.
Among King’s crew, Troy Boner’s nickname was “Mr. Hollywood” because of his movie-star good looks and fashionably cool persona. But as Caradori started to interview Boner, his cool demeanor began to crack. Caradori’s questions required a degree of introspection, and as Boner was confronted with the horrors of his life, he became increasingly uncomfortable. At certain points in the interview, Boner seemed to look back on the carnage of his life with shock and dismay.
Boner recalled that a friend of his introduced him to Alan Baer in August of 1983. He said he was seventeen years old when he first met Baer, but his date of birth was January 16, 1967; so in actuality he would have been sixteen years old in August of 1983. Boner related that he had a number of paid sexual encounters with Baer at his Twin Towers apartment before meeting Larry King.
Boner said that Baer had given pictures of him (Boner) to King prior to Boner’s initially meeting King at a gay bar. Boner claimed that King, who introduced himself as “Chuck,” approached him and tucked a $100 bill in his shirt pocket. King then took him to dinner, and they drove to a Red Lion Inn—Boner alleged that King performed oral sex on him, and gave him an additional $50.
After their initial sexual encounter, King put up Boner at a Travel Lodge Inn for three weeks. Boner said that King would routinely stop by in the afternoons to have anal sex with him. He also alleged that King was fond of being urinated on. Boner said King eventually provided him with a furnished apartment in Omaha—King regularly visited the apartment to have sex with Boner or for sexual liaisons with other minors.
Boner also spoke about his relationship with Owen: He confessed that he had taken Owen’s virginity and also stated he had introduced her to Chief Wadman, but he recalled that their introduction occurred at a party in the Woodman Tower, rather than the Twin Towers. Boner confirmed Owen’s alleged Wednesday afternoon trysts with Wadman and even named the same hotels that she specified. Boner said that Owen was often threatened and even “slapped around” by one of King’s henchmen to ensure her compliance with Wadman and others in King’s network.
Boner, like Owen, discussed being on interstate flights to be pandered as an underage prostitute and being used as a drug courier. Boner and Owen both mentioned making a joint drug run to Los Angeles on United Airlines for Larry King. Regarding a second drug run, Boner backed Owen’s account, saying they flew to Los Angeles on a commercial flight to make a drug buy for Alan Baer— both Boner and Owen mentioned that they scored “$4,000 worth of cocaine” for him.
Boner, again corroborating Owen’s allegations, discussed a private charter flight to California that included Larry King, Owen, Danny King (no relation to Larry King), two prepubescent boys, and himself. Boner and Owen remembered a stopover in Denver and then flying to Southern California. Owen, who admitted to be being “bombed,” recalled Larry King departing at a “small airport in California” with one of the prepubescent boys as the others proceeded to an airport near Pasadena— Owen speculated that the boy had been either sold or murdered.
Boner, who confessed he was “flying on coke,” told a slightly different tale: Everyone departed the plane at the airport near Pasadena, and he said that Owen and Danny King were picked up by a fat, older white male. He told Caradori and Ormiston that he then accompanied Larry King in a rental car as King dropped off each of the little boys at two different locations. As Caradori questioned Boner about the two little boys, he had great difficulty elaborating—he repeatedly turned his head to the right, sighed loudly, and made a number of nervous gestures. Boner ultimately said he believed the two younger kids had been “sold.”
In Southern California, Boner alleged, Larry King pandered Owen and Danny King to a pair of sadistic pedophiles, again corroborating Owen—she had said that she and Danny King had been served to a couple of sadistic pedophiles in Pasadena. Boner related that he and Larry King picked up Owen and Danny King following their nightmarish ordeal. According to Boner, Owen “looked and smelled” terrible and Danny King wanted to “go back and kill the guy.” On the return flight to Omaha, Owen refused to talk to him. Boner said he felt like reporting Larry King after the trip, but he was afraid to contact law enforcement.
Boner also described taking commercial flights to Los Angeles: On one Los Angeles trip, he said, King arranged for him to have a tryst with a prominent producer, whose name he mentioned. On a second trip to Los Angeles, he was driven to the Hollywood home of a man named “Henry,” who tied him up and played various “sexual games” with him. In addition, Boner discussed extremely sadistic child-sex orgies that corresponded to the sadistic abuse endured by Owen. He talked about a party at the Woodman Tower, and alleged that he was forced to have oral sex with his “best friend” Danny King and that Larry King then had anal sex with him and put out a cigarette on his buttocks.
Boner confessed to Caradori that he had trepidations about returning to the Omaha area, so Caradori rented a small apartment in Lincoln for him. Caradori later said that Boner was accustomed to living the high life, even though his mindset often resembled that of a confused adolescent. Boner boasted of $1,000 suits and $500 shoes, but he had never washed his own clothes. When Caradori took Boner out to eat, Caradori typically ordered a cheeseburger; Boner would order a T-bone steak.
After Boner’s second interview, Caradori visited Berry’s office later that morning to give him an update—Berry told Caradori to stick around because Senator Schmit wanted to talk to him. When Schmit arrived, he expressed his concerns to Caradori and Berry about the FBI starting to scrutinize his businesses. They also discussed whether or not they should “go public” with Caradori’s evidence or proceed directly to Washington, DC, because they felt that influential agencies of both state and federal law enforcement in Nebraska were corrupt and antagonistic to their objectives. Caradori’s Investigative Report recorded that the meeting yielded only uncertainty regarding their next move.
The next day, Caradori and Boner drove to Omaha and proceeded to Danny King’s apartment. Boner knocked on the front door as Caradori stood next to him. Danny King let Boner into the apartment, and Boner briefly explained Caradori’s intentions to King—Caradori noted that Boner and Danny King were alone for “two minutes” before he entered the residence. Both the apartment and King were in a state of disarray. King was admittedly recovering from an LSD spree, and the sudden arrival of Boner and then Caradori had shocked him like a stun gun—he was paranoid and frightened.
The twenty-year-old King—short, frail, and skinny—had a blanched, boyish face, and, because of a congenital throat condition, he spoke in a guttural rasp. Danny King had a single, nomadic mother, and he grew up as a wild child with very little supervision, whereas Owen came from an intact nuclear family and Boner came from a semi-intact family. King also lacked the native intelligence and even nominal self-esteem of Owen and Boner.
King was unemployed and in the process of being evicted—Caradori had him pack up all of his belongings, which fit into a bulging vinyl suitcase. As the three climbed into Caradori’s car, King started volunteering details about his abuse, but Caradori politely asked him to refrain from discussing the subject. During the drive back to Lincoln, King sat silently in the front seat, and Boner, sitting in the back seat, occasionally reassured him: “Everything is going to be alright. Nobody is going to hurt us anymore….”
Caradori, Boner and King arrived at the offices of Caracorp at approximately 11:30 P.M. Caradori then “indicated” that Boner should return to his apartment, a few blocks from Caracorp. Before Caradori drove King to the Residence Inn, he asked Boner if he and King had discussed any details of their experiences during that day, and Boner replied that they hadn’t. King then asked Boner, “Did you tell them everything?” and Boner responded, “Yes, I told them everything.”
Caradori met Ormiston at the Residence Inn the following morning. After breakfast with Danny King, they proceeded to King’s room. As King seated himself in front of the video camera, he became visibly frightened and agitated. He told Caradori and Ormiston that the statements of Owen and Boner were fabricated, and he wanted to leave. Caradori talked to King, attempting to assuage his concerns, and King confessed that he was afraid of retribution, disclosing that he had been threatened just three and a half weeks earlier. After King’s acute fears abated and he relaxed, Ormiston read the waiver, and it was then signed by King and Caradori and notarized by Ormiston.
King said Boner initially introduced him to Alan Baer in the fall of 1983, when he was fourteen years old—he maintained that he accompanied Boner to Baer’s Twin Towers apartment, and the three drank schnapps. King claimed that he didn’t have sex with Baer at their first meeting—Boner also said that Danny King and Baer didn’t have sex on that occasion. King disclosed that he took the bus to Baer’s Twin Towers apartment approximately two weeks later. He and Baer again knocked back schnapps, and Baer performed oral sex on Danny King—afterward Baer gave him fifty dollars. King said he then started having sexual liaisons with Baer on a weekly basis.
Danny King recalled meeting Larry King at Baer’s apartment around April 1984, when Larry King took him into Baer’s bedroom and allegedly had anal sex with him. Danny King said that he pleaded with Larry King to stop, since it was hurting him; so Larry King had Danny King perform oral sex on him. Danny King spit out Larry King’s semen, he said, prompting Larry King to smack him on the side of the head with his shoe. Danny King also discussed the party at Woodman Tower where Larry King forced him and Boner to have sex together, corroborating Boner.
Danny King, Troy Boner, and Alisha Owen all reported accompanying Larry King and the two little boys on a private flight to Southern California. But Danny King remembered being delivered to a party at a house where he was required to perform oral sex on a man, instead of the hotel mentioned by Owen. King corroborated Owen on a flight to Kansas City, even though his description of the events differed slightly from Owen’s. He confirmed that Larry King delivered him and Owen to a hotel with a waterfall. Danny King described three men initially showing up at their room, and Owen said a third man turned up later. A second discrepancy noted by Caradori was that Owen said one man molested her and two men molested King, whereas King claimed that two men molested Owen and one man molested him. Danny King also corroborated Owen’s claim that Larry King’s primary henchman was named Larry.
Caradori noted that Danny King was very disoriented and had difficulties remembering that January followed December—I would eventually locate Danny King, and I, too, would find him extremely confused, befuddled, and possessed of a flawed recollection on even relatively straightforward events.
Caradori videotaped Danny King for approximately six hours with periodic breaks, and then drove him to the apartment he rented for Boner. Caradori was a meticulous investigator, and he realized the importance of corroborating their videotaped statements. So he spent the next two days shuttling King to Omaha and Council Bluffs to identify the numerous locations he had mentioned throughout his statement. As Caradori and King navigated a major Omaha thoroughfare, King identified the Twin Towers and pinpointed Baer’s apartment balcony. Caradori also had an associate shuttle Boner to Omaha and Council Bluffs for the same purpose— they subsequently photographed the locations named by Boner and Danny King. After accruing scores of photos, Caradori had Boner and King separately identify them, and they consistently corroborated each other on the photographed locations.
Interestingly, the allegations of Owen and Danny King corroborated Shawneta Moore on one perpetrator, even though they had never met her. Moore had told Irl Carmean that an administrator for the Fort Calhoun school system accompanied Larry King to one of the child-sex parties she attended, and both Owen and Danny King identified the same individual as frequenting King’s sex parties. Moreover, Owen, Boner, and Danny King corroborated Eulice Washington on the chartered flights. Owen and Boner also corroborated Washington on the entanglement of Boys Town’s students in King’s pandering network.
By mid-December of 1989, Caradori had accrued approximately twenty-one hours of victim testimony from Owen, Boner, and King. His Investigative Reports noted that the evidence he was amassing had begun to create dissonance between him and the Committee and also spark confusion within the Committee itself. As the Committee members were confronted with Caradori’s mounting evidence, they became increasingly perplexed about where to turn because of their distrust of state and federal law enforcement. Unrequited overtures to the US Attorney General’s Office further confounded the Committee members. Caradori’s Investigative Reports also indicated that he was extremely concerned for the welfare of Owen, Boner, and King. In addition to renting an apartment for Boner and King, he purchased food and various toiletry articles for them.
In a letter to Berry, he acknowledged that the victims he videotaped represented a “small portion” of the case, but he felt that the Committee had a responsibility to look out for their welfare. He requested that they receive physicals, counseling, and “secured living arrangements.” Caradori mentioned that Owen was particularly vulnerable and emphasized that her cooperation should not be made public until she was in a safe environment that met both the needs of the Committee and also her obligations to the State of Nebraska. He stressed that the victims had never communicated their experiences before, and, therefore, he had established a trusting bond with them that needed to be nurtured and free of “surprises.” Caradori concluded the letter by stating that his “requests may seem unusual,” but the financial resources of the perpetrators and the “possible political ramifications” made it necessary for the Committee’s moves to be “cautious, well planned, and expedient.”
Caradori’s investigation was quickly sideswiped by one of the surprises he had feared in his letter to Committee counsel Berry. Two NSP investigators made a visit to Owen at York on December 15, and their visit elicited an alarming phone call from her. Caradori immediately phoned York’s warden, who confirmed that two NSP investigators had interviewed Owen throughout the afternoon. After Caradori spoke to both Schmit and Berry, he drove to York that night, but he arrived too late in the evening for York personnel to grant him entry into the prison.
Caradori drove to York again the following day and talked to Owen. She said that the investigators had arrived at York in the morning, conspicuously ate lunch in the cafeteria with the inmates, and then interviewed Owen in the warden’s office. According to Owen, the NSP investigators were menacing to her, and they degraded Caradori. She told Caradori the investigators declared that the Franklin Committee didn’t exist.
Caradori checked the prison’s logs and noticed that two NSP investigators signed in at 9:29 A.M. and signed out at 3:15 P.M. The Committee had yet to hand over the videotaped statements of the victims to state and federal law enforcement; Caradori surmised that Owen’s whereabouts had been gleaned through wiretaps. For Caradori, the NSP’s sandbagging of Owen would be merely the first of many “surprises.”
Caradori feared that the NSP investigators’ salient presence at York and their interrogation of Owen in the warden’s office would set off rumors of her being a jailhouse snitch—six weeks later three inmates attacked her in the prison’s shower room. The State Ombudsman’s Office, which investigates citizens’ complaints against state administrative agencies, conducted an inquiry into the assault on Owen, and it concluded that the attack “was motivated, in part, because some of her fellow inmates thought that she might be an informant against the women at York.”
The Ombudsman investigators wrote the following about Owen: “We did not find, in our dealings with her in this matter, that she engaged in any exaggeration or magnification of the facts; nor did we detect any attempt on her part to stretch the truth or to falsely color the facts surrounding the assault upon her.” Shortly after the assault, Owen was placed in “24 hour lock up” segregation for her own “protection”—she would remain in solitary for nearly two years.
Three days after the NSP investigators harassed Owen at York, the Committee held a press conference in Lincoln, announcing that it would hand over its twenty-one hours of videotaped testimony to Nebraska’s Attorney General and the US Attorney for Nebraska. The Committee also publicized a letter that would accompany the tapes. The Lincoln Journal quoted Berry commenting on the letter: “Our letter was to show that we’re keeping a lot of options open,” he said. “The fact of turning this information over is not our swan song. We’re not removing ourselves from the quest.”
The letter itself stated, “It is the opinion of committee members that the activities described and the personalities involved scream out for action whether the statute of limitations problems are involved or not.” The letter also alluded to the possibility of others covering up crimes: “The members of the committee are dismayed by the fact that no state or federal investigative bodies interviewed any of the witnesses we have, even though they were discovered by our investigative efforts after a fairly short time and with a very small budget.”
Perhaps Attorney General Robert Spire forgot that his office initially refused to honor the Committee’s subpoenas when he responded to the letter: “There has been a high degree of cooperation all along between the Franklin Committee and the Attorney General’s Office, and I’m sure that will continue.” Spire then criticized the Committee for implying a cover-up and defended the efforts of state and federal law enforcement. “The letter in effect is saying that the FBI and State Patrol have not done a good job,” he said. “I do not think that’s fair…. They’ve been very thorough.” He then promised that the State Patrol would “get right on it.” He neglected to mention that the NSP had jumped “right on it” three days earlier, harassing Owen at York.[Lying sack of s%*t DC]
After the Committee held its press conference, it directed Caradori to condense the statements of Alisha Owen, Troy Boner, and Danny King into a five-hour video, which it showed to select officials within Nebraska’s judiciary and law enforcement on December 19. The officials included Assistant Attorney General William Howland, an NSP official from their Criminal Division, the Sheriffs of Douglas and Butler counties, and a Douglas County judge. The Committee hoped to marshal support from the officials before surrendering the tapes to state and federal law enforcement. The Sheriff of Douglas County would, in fact, tell the Lincoln Journal-Star that he found the victims’ testimony on the videotapes to be credible.
The Committee submitted its twenty-one hours of videotaped statements to the offices of Nebraska’s Attorney General and the US Attorney on December 27, 1989. Spire and US Attorney Ronald Lahners were now forced to act—the toothpaste had managed to squirt out of the tube. They no longer had the luxury of defaulting to the canard that the child-abuse allegations didn’t “bear up.” In addition to pledging immediate action by the NSP, Spire called upon the Douglas County judges to impanel a grand jury to probe the child-abuse allegations.
Caradori had strong misgivings when the Committee relinquished its videotaped statements to state and federal law enforcement: His primary concerns were FBI or NSP harassment of victims, as Owen had already endured, and also leaks to the press. He realized that Owen, Boner, and Danny King were fragile, and he felt that heat from the FBI or NSP would melt their cooperation. Moreover, his videotaped statements contained the names of several additional victims who would be subjected to harassment before he even had an opportunity to contact them— Caradori had made contact with several victims who refused to talk to him for fear of publicity and reprisal.
Ironically, the first media onslaught that staggered Caradori’s investigation wouldn’t be incited by law enforcement but, rather, by a memo from John DeCamp.
On January 18, 1990, DeCamp sent a memo to reporters at the World-Herald and Lincoln Journal, stating that the public “is rapidly losing faith in its fundamental institutions of government” because of the way law enforcement entities have conducted their investigations into the allegations. The “DeCamp Memo” then listed Larry King and four other prominent Nebraskans as the “centerpieces in a coordinated program of child abuse.” DeCamp insisted that the names in his memo weren’t garnered through the Committee, nor had he watched Caradori’s videotapes: He claimed the five names were a ubiquitous buzz in Omaha bars and coffee shops and on the city’s street corners, even though the names had been “quietly and carefully” covered up by the press.
“A reporter,” the memo declared, “has to be deaf, dumb, blind, and corrupt not to know the names of the personalities involved and the scope of the allegations.” In addition to alleging a media cover-up, DeCamp threw down a challenge to the press: “Now when the personalities are the most powerful media people in the state —who hold the ability to destroy your reporting careers—let’s see the same press coverage and exposure and investigative reporting that you are capable of when dealing with the lesser people of the state.” Moreover, DeCamp challenged the five prominent individuals to sue him: “No, I do not fear a lawsuit. I fear just like any alleged child victims in this bizarre tragedy, that the rich and the powerful will use their positions of power and control of institutions of government to shut up those who would speak out and bring things to a head.”
The World-Herald and Lincoln Journal reported on the “DeCamp Memo,” but neither newspaper identified the alleged perpetrators named by DeCamp. Instead, each paper published a collage of quotes dispensed by Committee members excoriating DeCamp for disclosing the names. Though Nebraska newspapers declined to report on the names cited by DeCamp, an Omaha radio personality allowed a caller to recite the names mentioned in the memo—she was fired shortly thereafter. A candidate for the Nebraska legislature also mailed 10,000 copies of the memo to registered voters in his Omaha district.
According to DeCamp, two events triggered his memo: a personal interaction with Nick O’Hara, special agent in charge of the FBI’s Omaha Field Office, and an article in the Lincoln Journal. In the spring of 1989, before the Committee had hired Caradori, they were frustrated by the seeming inactivity of the OPD and NSP to investigate the child-abuse allegations, and they had concerns about OPD Chief Wadman. So Schmit turned to his personal attorney, John DeCamp, for legal advice, and DeCamp suggested that Schmit approach Nick O’Hara—DeCamp accompanied Schmit to the Omaha FBI, where Schmit initially had a one-on-one with O’Hara. After Schmit and O’Hara conversed for an hour, DeCamp joined them, and, he said, O’Hara discharged a grave warning to both Schmit and DeCamp: He contended that anyone who cast aspersions on Wadman’s character would be subjected to the wrath of the FBI.[Like I said gestapo DC]
The second event was motivated by professional self-preservation: A Lincoln Journal article, “Franklin Witness Says DeCamp Offered to Help in Suing State, Police,” reported that DeCamp had volunteered to represent Shawneta Moore, whom it quoted: “He wants to sue the police department and the state for, like, negligence.” DeCamp explicitly told the Lincoln Journal reporter that Moore had originally phoned him, but the article implied that he had initiated the contact. The Lincoln Journal article also alluded to DeCamp having “inside information” about the Franklin investigation, and it provoked a hostile inquiry from a World-Herald reporter who questioned DeCamp concerning his Franklin sources. DeCamp felt that his memo to the Lincoln Journal and World-Herald would prevent future distortions about his knowledge of events and where he had acquired that knowledge.
Moore ultimately opted not to retain DeCamp, but a week after the article appeared the Nebraska Bar Association informed DeCamp that his license to practice law was “under investigation” because he “may have attempted to solicit legal business.” DeCamp responded to the Bar complaint with an affidavit from a friend of Moore’s whom he had previously represented, stating that she suggested Moore contact DeCamp, and affidavits from two secretaries confirming that Moore had initiated the contact. The Nebraska Bar would ultimately clear DeCamp of any improprieties.
The DeCamp Memo had a seismic impact on the Nebraska airwaves, and its aftershocks were even felt outside of Nebraska: The Kansas City Star reported on the memo, and it received a minor blurb in Newsweek. Gary Caradori, however, became increasingly agitated about the memo, because the media frenzy it incited created an unfavorable ripple effect for his investigation—he found it more and more difficult to coax victims and others who had information to come forward.
The collective reverberations of DeCamp’s memo, Caradori’s investigation, and the impending Douglas County grand jury coincided with a pair of major “surprises.” The first occurred when President George H.W. Bush rolled into town—Bush would speak at a February 7, 1990, fundraiser for Governor Orr, a fellow Republican. Larry King considered the president a personal “friend” and proudly displayed a picture of himself and Bush, looking like the best of friends, at the Franklin Credit Union. You will recall that King hosted a $100,000 gala for the newly-nominated Bush at the 1988 Republican Convention in New Orleans.
A source informed Caradori that King had purchased a ticket to attend the “$1,000- a-couple” fundraiser, even though the event’s organizers later denied it. The source also disclosed to Caradori that when the Secret Service discovered King’s plan to grace the fundraiser, they either ushered him to the federal courthouse or demanded that he make haste thereto. Either way, King made an impromptu appearance at the federal courthouse in the early afternoon of February 7, before US Magistrate Richard Kopf. (In the US federal court system, a magistrate judge is a judge appointed to assist a US District Court judge in the performance of his or her duties. Magistrate judges serve terms of eight years if full-time, or four years if part-time, and may be reappointed. They conduct a wide range of judicial proceedings to expedite the disposition of cases in United States District Courts.)
Magistrate Kopf ordered King to undergo a “mental health evaluation” at the US Medical Center for Federal Prisoners in Springfield, Missouri—”with no delay.” King waived a hearing on Kopf’s ruling and immediately found himself en route to Springfield in the custody of two US marshals. Kopf’s preemptive decision on King’s “mental health,” made without a motion from anyone, was extremely odd, but the magistrate didn’t feel inclined to defend his ruling. When questioned about his decree, Kopf stated, “The decision speaks for itself!”
The outspoken Senator Chambers, who had resigned from the Committee the previous July, chimed in on King’s sudden psychiatric woes. In a World-Herald article, Chambers is quoted as having “reason to believe” King planned to attend the fundraiser. “Powerful people at the national level,” Chambers surmised, “have more to gain by Larry King being eliminated than standing trial, people of sufficient power to cause him to be sent to Springfield in the first place.” Chambers quipped that he would elaborate on his allegations if King “should die or his mind should be destroyed.” Senator Schmit wasn’t buying King’s mental maladies either—he said that he was “very suspicious” about the circumstances surrounding King’s mentalhealth exodus.
Meanwhile, personnel at the Springfield medical facility were evidently taking King’s newfound “condition” rather seriously. An administrator at Springfield assured the Lincoln Journal that King’s mental health evaluation commenced “the minute he walked through the door.” The administrator mentioned that the evaluation would include assessments by psychiatrists and psychologists, including a battery of mental-health tests.
Though Springfield personnel were purportedly determined to probe the depths of Larry King’s psyche, his friends and family were left scratching their heads about this unexpected turn of events. King had ostensibly found employment with an Omaha florist as he awaited his upcoming trial, and the owner of the floral shop told the Lincoln Journal that King hadn’t shown any signs of mental problems, nor had he undergone abrupt behavioral changes—he even said that King was an above average employee. King’s pastor concurred with the employer. “He is a man under stress and is coping with it the best he can,” said the pastor. “I thought under the circumstances he was doing pretty well.” In a World-Herald interview, King’s pastor speculated that he would be surprised if King was found to be psychologically unsound: “I didn’t see any indications of mental problems.” [Now you folks watch CLOSELY this will be the same path they take with Epstein,in order to keep him from a trial if they cannot suicide him DC]
But Springfield’s chief psychiatrist disagreed and diagnosed King with a “probable delusional paranoid disorder, grandiose type.” King was returned to Omaha on March 18, and roughly two weeks later he was again marched before Magistrate Kopf. Kopf embraced the diagnosis of Springfield’s chief psychiatrist and ruled that King’s “intellectual system of grandiosity leads to disorganization of thought processes which gravely impairs the ability of Mr. King to withstand a lengthy trial.” In other words, he declared King unfit for trial—he also sealed his psychiatric report. [So it will be this route for Epstein OR, the O.J. route,which I hardly doubt,but who knows given what the pond scum thinks about how stupid Americans are DC]
US District Judge William Cambridge, who was slated to be King’s trial judge for his financial charges, adopted Kopf’s findings and recommendations and found King incompetent to stand trial. He ordered that King be taken “forthwith” to the US Medical Facility in Rochester, Minnesota. Cambridge instructed Rochester personnel to determine if King had the “capacity to permit the trial to proceed” in the foreseeable future. US Attorney Lahners didn’t object to Cambridge’s maneuver and actually seemed rather pleased by this chain of events because of his foremost concern for King’s mental health. “It’s in the best interest of the defendant to get back into treatment,” remarked Lahners. Kopf’s bizarre and preemptive whisking of King to Springfield, Cambridge’s cosigning Kopf’s ruling, and Lahner’s kowtowing ensured that King would be safely tucked away from both wayward subpoenas and the press.[The reader needs to remember something as he or she reads,this trial they are talking about had NOTHING to do with child abuse,this trial concerned the missing money from Franklin! Now you ask yourself since this stunt with King how many other thieves have been declared unfit for trial because of so called mental health? Off hand, I cannot think of one,any reminders by a reader are welcome DC]
King’s extraordinary treatment by the federal judiciary begs a rather troubling question: Were federal judges bending over backwards to provide a legal sanctuary for an alleged child molester?
King would have a five-month sabbatical in Minnesota as a “pretrial detainee.” The US Medical Facility in Rochester is considered to be the “Club Fed” in the federal prison system, and King’s stay at Rochester would overlap with those of evangelical charlatan Jim Baker, political agitator Lyndon LaRouche, and Joey Aiuppa, the former capo of the Chicago mafia. I interviewed a former federal prisoner who served time at Rochester with King—he told me that King didn’t display the slightest signs of mental instability. He also said that Rochester’s other high-profile criminals made an effort to steer clear of him.
While psychiatrists in Springfield were diagnosing King as “delusional,” Omaha World-Herald columnist Peter Citron would be at the epicenter of a second surprise.
At approximately 6:00 P.M. on February 22, 1990, OPD officers converged on the fifty-year-old Citron at Omaha’s Ak-Sar-Ben horse track, and he was arrested for the felonious sexual assault of two children. Citron’s charges stemmed from his sexual molestation of two boys, ages 11 and 13, who lived in his neighborhood and did “chores” for him. The “rumors” of Citron’s perversity had wafted to the mother of one of the boys, and she asked her son if Citron had acted inappropriately with him. The boy confessed to Citron’s abuse, and his mother phoned the OPD—her son also knew of a second boy who had been molested by Citron.
On the night of Citron’s arrest, the OPD executed a search warrant at his home. The OPD officers who raided Citron’s house found a sordid assortment of 8-millimeter films, videos, pictures, and magazines. Citron’s prized kiddy porn collection included the following magazines:Young Boys & Masturbation; Chicken Little; Naked Boyhood; Boyland; Young and Ready; Boy Heat; Like Young; Young Boys and Fellatio; Teenage Masturbation; Young Boys and Sex Play; Oh Boy; Kids; Naked Boyhood; Boys, Boys, Boys; and Young Boys and Sodomy.
Citron spent the night in jail, and the next day he and his lawyer, James Martin Davis, appeared in Douglas County District Court. Standing before the judge in a rumpled sports shirt, blue jeans, and loafers, the diminutive Citron entered a plea of “not guilty” to the charges. Douglas County Deputy Attorney Bob Sigler requested that the judge forgo requiring Citron to post bail, and he skipped out of the courthouse without coughing up a penny or saying a word to a swarm of reporters.
Though Citron didn’t feel inclined to talk, his attorney wasn’t shying away from the press. Davis emphasized that the charges against Citron weren’t Franklin-related, but he said he would have to withdraw from Citron’s case due to the fact that he had previously advised Senator Schmit on the Committee’s investigative direction. Davis then gave an impassioned soliloquy on how “Omaha is going to be the first city to gossip itself to death” as he condemned the city’s rampant rumor-mongering: “We’re suffering here in Omaha under a firestorm of suspicion, and we have hurricane-force rumors. Peter Citron and so many others are suffering as a result of that.” [Typical piece of s*%t defense attorney concerned about his pockets instead of true justice DC]
The viewpoint that Peter Citron’s “suffering” would be the byproduct of rumors is a bit peculiar, especially after he was arrested for molesting two children, but the World-Herald seemed to sprinkle sympathy on Citron too. In an article published two days after his arrest, “Citron: Rumors Have Ruined Journalism Career in Omaha,” the World-Herald reported that an indignant Citron felt that “the rumors about his involvement in Franklin” had destroyed his career, even though the World-Herald had suspended him only after his arrest. Citron also thoroughly denied his purported association with Franklin. “If I have any connection with the Franklin case,” said Citron, “so does anyone who’s ever eaten at a Larry King restaurant, because that’s the only connection I’ve had with him.” Citron maintained that he had three interactions with King—“twice in person and once by phone,” and only in the capacity of a journalist.
Within days of Citron’s arrest, the Committee requested that Douglas County law enforcement provide the Committee with the evidence it had collected from its investigation of Citron. But Douglas County Attorney Ronald Staskiewicz refused to assist the Committee—he contended that imparting information to the Committee would “jeopardize” the Douglas County investigation of Citron and also the upcoming “grand jury investigation.” Schmit responded by saying that he considered Citron to be a “small fry” in the Franklin hierarchy of perpetrators, and he was annoyed by law enforcement’s chasing of “straw men.”
Citron would be allowed to plead “no contest” to two counts of felony child molestation. His lawyer said the plea meant “we do not wish to contest the charges, and we do not admit to the charges.” The cover story for Citron opting to plead no contest was that he decided not to subject himself and the two boys to the trauma of trial. But under the terms of Citron’s plea agreement, he would be absolved of additional charges stemming from the OPD’s seizure of his cache of child pornography. So, ultimately, Citron never had to face the music for his kiddy porn collection. In addition to the magazines, Citron had a considerable ensemble of Polaroid pictures, videos, and 8-millimeter films. Citron’s two counts of child molestation each carried a maximum penalty of five years in prison and a $10,000 fine; but if he were charged on the many counts of child pornography that his colossal collection of kiddy porn potentially entailed, he would have been staring at decades in prison.
Following his plea of no contest, Citron was sentenced to between three and eight years in prison for two counts of child molestation. The sentencing judge said that Citron was a “convicted child molester with repeat offenses over the past twenty five years.” Though Citron had never been charged with child abuse during his years in Omaha, he had been charged with molestation twenty-five years earlier in his native New York. Moreover, additional victims of Citron stepped forward after his arrest. But the statute of limitations had expired on their alleged abuses, and Citron skated on those charges too.
Shortly after Citron’s arrest, a police spokesman said that the OPD and the Douglas County Attorney were the only “agencies” involved in investigating the molestation charges leveled against Citron. However, an NSP memo dated the day of Citron’s arrest referred to a prior FBI memo, which stated that US Postal Inspectors had the name and address of Peter Citron on a list “of individuals who are known to have received child pornographic material.” Thus, Citron had a history of child molestation, his name turned up on a list of individuals receiving kiddy porn through the mail, but federal and state law enforcement had ignored him until his name surfaced in connection with Franklin, and they nonetheless vowed that Citron was not actually connected to the scandal.[Yeah and the sky is green DC]
Though Douglas County Attorney Ronald Staskiewicz and Assistant Douglas County Attorney Bob Sigler continued to insist the charges against Citron weren’t Franklin-related, they never allowed the Committee to scrutinize the evidence impounded from Citron’s home—even after he was sentenced and the state’s grand jury had been dismissed. In fact, Citron’s profuse stock of kiddy porn would be conveniently sealed when he was sentenced.
By the time of the arrest, Gary Caradori had been on Citron’s heels for quite some time. Caradori wrote a letter to Citron on January 31, 1990, requesting an interview, and his Investigative Report on the day of Citron’s arrest stated, “It is my opinion now that Peter Citron could be a very helpful reference in this case if the proper arrangements were made.” Besides street buzz linking Citron and King as perpetrators, Owen said that she had seen Citron at a Twin Towers sex party. Moreover, Caradori would videotape a fourth victim in May, who also linked Citron to the Twin Towers sex parties.
I also possess interviews conducted by Caradori where Citron’s name springs up. In the first interview, Caradori questioned a “confidential informant” who did consulting for King and the Franklin Credit Union—she remarked that she and King had a meeting in his office where King specifically instructed his secretary “to get Citron on the phone.” The second interview was with a Nebraska Department of Social Services supervisor. Caradori asked him about Citron, and he replied that it was common to see Citron in the company of “little boys.” Caradori inquired why nobody in Social Services scrutinized Citron’s activities—the interviewee responded that it wasn’t his “responsibility.” Caradori then pressed him for an explanation for Social Services’ steering clear of Citron, and he responded, “I don’t have a good answer for that.”
In a third interview, Caradori made contact with a twenty-seven-year-old woman who conveyed a story of horrific abuse. Her story is weighted with intricate details, which buttressed its credibility: She grew up in the Omaha area, and she said that starting at the age of thirteen she had been subjected to repeated molestations and beatings by her father and pornographically photographed by one of his friends. She told Caradori that she was regularly forced to accompany her father on nighttime jaunts to a church in Omaha or a location in Lincoln where groups of older men took turns molesting her. She knew few identities, and Caradori was never able to link her directly to the subjects of his investigation. But her father worked in the communications field, and she did identify a local newscaster as one of her abusers. She also related to Caradori that her father had delivered her to a hotel room where Citron awaited. Citron, however, became enraged that her father had furnished him a little girl instead of a little boy—he kicked her out of his room, demanding her brother. She said that her father battered her for disappointing Citron.
Citron’s arrest was in the wake of a major metamorphosis at the World-Herald: Larry King booster Harold Andersen ⇭[communications? DC stepped down as the World-Herald’s CEO after over two decades, and became a contributing editor. Shortly before Andersen relinquished his lofty status at the World-Herald, he and his wife were honored by the Nebraska Society of Washington, DC with its annual Distinguished Nebraskan award—it was the first time the Society honored a couple with the award. Nebraska Senator J.J. Exon presented the award to Harold Andersen, and Governor Kay Orr presented the award to his wife. The ceremony even included a tribute letter from President George H.W. Bush, who bestowed praise on Andersen for his “efforts to improve the quality of life in his community.” Bush also described the World Herald as “an example of journalistic integrity.”
By the time of Larry King’s hospitalization and Citron’s arrest, Caradori found himself treading a treacherous minefield that required him to navigate tapped phones, repeated intimidation, and harassment of victims and witnesses. To circumvent the scrutiny and surveillance, he started using pay phones and taking other covert measures to ensure the integrity of his investigation. Though Caradori took measures to nimbly sidestep a gauntlet of potential hazards, he couldn’t dodge criticism as his investigation became the focal point of “leaks” and media bias, led by the World-Herald.
James Allen Flanery’s World-Herald reportage on Franklin had been unprejudiced and attentive, but he took a leave of absence from the newspaper for a year in August of 1989 to teach journalism at the University of Kansas. The World-Herald ultimately replaced Flanery with reporters who were seemingly hostile to the Franklin Committee and its investigation, and they started churning out articles that were clearly slanted. The Committee mandated that Caradori refrain from media interaction, and he was forced to be a bystander as a hostile media started dismantling his investigation—and the victims he had interviewed.
Caradori also started to take considerable heat from the local media for the expenses Caracorp was accruing after the Committee’s press conference announcing its twenty-one hours of videotaped statements. The media inquiries prompted Nebraska’s Secretary of State to scrutinize Caracorp’s billing. Under the terms of Caracorp’s contract with the Committee, Caracorp charged the Committee a whopping $24.00 an hour for investigative services and $7.00 an hour for clerical support.
In a comeback letter to the Secretary of State, Caradori wrote that it was unfortunate he was forced “to respond to questions from unnamed sources arising out of Caracorp’s role in the Franklin Credit Union Investigation,” but he nonetheless “appreciated the opportunity to clarify” his handling and billing of the investigation. “Please understand that if I were billing this directly, as a private investigator, my billing rate would be anywhere from two to four times higher,” Caradori wrote in the letter.
After Caradori politely explained Caracorp’s charges, he turned his attention to the “unnamed sources” provoking the Secretary of State’s inquiry: “This infatuation with my billing and their scrutiny of my abilities and integrity can only be construed as something similar to a ‘witch hunt.’ Why? Am I too close to something they do not want to become public?” Caradori also touched on the peril he and his employees had faced throughout the investigation: “I must reiterate that we—my employees and myself—have been followed and questionable situations have arisen during this investigation. Threatening situations have resulted numerous times.”
In February, Caracorp was slapped with its first federal subpoena. The subpoena ordered Caracorp to surrender every shred of its evidence regarding the individuals named in the DeCamp Memo. Inexplicably, Omaha’s KMTV Channel 3 obtained a copy of the subpoena and broadcast excerpts of it. The subpoena would be the first of many leaks that state and federal law enforcement would pin on Caradori and the Committee. In a World-Herald article, First Assistant US Attorney Thomas Thalken exclaimed that leaking the subpoena was a “deplorable” act, and he “assumed” it was provided by someone affiliated with Caracorp or the Committee.
Thalken’s allegation made Caradori’s blood simmer, and he was quick to fire off a memo to the US Attorney’s Office. In the first paragraph of the memo, Caradori commented on the risks of making assumptions: “To ‘assume’ in the investigative business is as dangerous as ignoring evidence and supportive evidence, when evidence is presented. It is appalling, and certainly disquieting, when the US Attorney’s Office makes public assumptions on any matter.” Later in the memo Caradori pointed out Thalken’s double standards and demanded proof for his statements to the media: “For you, Mr. Thalken, to ‘assume’ that information regarding the subpoena came from me or my office puts you in the same rumor mill as the people you are criticizing…. Also, it is recommended that you verify your sources before you ‘assume’ anything publicly or otherwise about matters related to this investigation.” Thalken never provided the proof Caradori requested.
A February article published in the World-Herald, “One Accuser was Guilty of a Felony,” reported that a twenty-one-year-old victim videotaped by the Committee was incarcerated at York for a bad check “felony.” The article didn’t directly name Alisha Owen, but it essentially marked a red bull’s-eye on her forehead. The article also detailed that a second videotaped victim had been the “subject of legal proceedings” in the Douglas County juvenile court. A second February World Herald article concerning Owen, approximately a week later, discussed the accuser’s “run-ins with the law in 1988 and 1989,” and mentioned she had been treated for “mental problems.”
Later in February, the World-Herald assaulted Owen’s motives for giving Caradori a formal statement: The article quoted Nebraska’s outgoing Corrections Director discussing the “21-one-year-old inmate” who “has given videotaped testimony to a legislative committee”—the article appeared two days before he bowed out of Nebraska to become Colorado’s Corrections Director. Showing remarkable disregard for Owen’s confidentiality, he said the inmate told prison officials that investigators involved in the child-abuse probe promised to have her sentence reduced. His statements, however, were at odds with the waiver signed by Caradori and Owen, which explicitly stated that no “promises” were made to Owen. The Director also said that Caradori and Ormiston were the inmate’s only regular visitors, even though York’s Visitor’s Register showed that family members visited Owen on a regular basis.
Since Owen had granted Caradori an interview, her quality of life had severely diminished: She had been harassed by the NSP, attacked by fellow inmates, confined to segregation, and the World-Herald had maligned her character. But those were only opening salvos: On the night of March 8, FBI agents and the NSP, executing a federal search warrant signed by Magistrate Kopf, raided Owen’s cell and seized a number of her personal belongings, even though York’s warden confirmed to a reporter that prison officials had the authority to search her cell and confiscate items at their whim. Committee Chairman, Senator Schmit, was shocked by the actions of the FBI and NSP: “I’m speechless,” he said about the search. “It would seem to me that they would have enough leads from the stuff we dumped into their laps…”
A March World-Herald article reported that Caradori hadn’t used lie-detector tests on the three victims. Shortly thereafter, a Lincoln Journal article, citing an “anonymous source,” reported that the two young men videotaped by Caradori flunked FBI polygraphs. The source said that the young men fabricated their stories because they were seeking riches via movie and book deals and also to help their friend dodge prison time.
The World-Herald, chronicling the earlier Lincoln Journal story, had a catchy frontpage article: “Paper: 2 Franklin Witnesses Flunked Lie Detector Tests.” The FBI refused comment on the leak, but a state senator who wasn’t affiliated with the Committee denounced the leaks as a violation of federal law and expressed his disgust over law enforcement’s response to the child-abuse allegations: “I’ve been around a lot of investigations in my 53 years, and I’ve never seen one like this in my life.” [A blind person could see this cover up DC]
Members of Concerned Parents and other citizens who were deeply disturbed by the World-Herald’s depiction of the victims repeatedly picketed the newspaper. The protesters passed out literature and touted signs—“Lie Detector Tests for Victims? Lie Detection for Suspects,” “Reporting or Fabricating,” “Pravda of Plains,” etc. A spokesperson for Concerned Parents was interviewed by a local television station, and she said that Nebraska’s “Bar-Press Guidelines”—voluntary principles that the Nebraska Bar Association and the media have agreed upon to provide fair trials for defendants—forbade the newspaper from attacking the credibility of the victims.
In response to the criticism, the World-Herald released an outlandish statement that justified its declaring open season on the victims. The newspaper put forward that the Bar-Press Guidelines were “designed to protect the rights of defendants not their accusers,” and because there are no defendants, “the Bar-Press Guidelines haven’t kicked in.” The Bar-Press Guidelines also discouraged publication of a defendant’s prior criminal record, but, again, the newspaper replied that this didn’t apply to the victims since they were not “defendants.” [not a 'news' paper,in fact a propaganda rag sheet in league with criminals to cover up their activity, and THIS has not changed! DC]
As leaks and newspaper coverage chipped away at the victims’ credibility like a jackhammer, Caradori wasn’t prepared for his investigation’s next ambush: His twenty-one hours of victim testimony inexplicably ended up at an Omaha TV station! By the end of March, KETV had acquired Caradori’s videotapes. At first, the station allowed J. William Gallup, an Omaha defense attorney, to screen excerpts of the tapes—Gallup exclaimed that he was “shocked” by Caradori’s questioning methods, and accused Caradori of leading the victims. Gallup didn’t seem to be particularly fond of the victims either—he later called Alisha Owen a “short, fat, ugly girl” during a speech he delivered to Omaha’s Rotary Club, and the World-Herald quoted him.
Gallup would quickly become a media darling for his outspoken criticism of the Committee and its investigation, and he routinely provided TV sound bites and World-Herald jibes—Gallup’s law firm actually represented Franklin’s financial mastermind Thomas Harvey! Shortly after Gallup’s Franklin debut, KETV started to broadcast almost nightly excerpts of the tapes with the victims’ faces scrambled.
The other stations in Omaha also acquired Caradori’s tapes, and they became quite a spectacle on Omaha’s nightly news. The leaked tapes sent a resounding message to victims who might have the temerity to step forward: In addition to being crucified in the print media, they would also be telling their deepest and darkest secrets to the greater Omaha area. The leaked tapes were a gushing catastrophe for Caradori, because he now found it nearly impossible to coax victims from the shadows.
A March World-Herald article, “2 Officials Disagree on Source of Leaks,” quoted Senator Schmit and Assistant Attorney General Howland sparring over the source of the leaks. Schmit stressed that the leaks occurred after the Committee relinquished the tapes on December 27 and implicated state or federal law enforcement: “There were no leaks as long as I had full possession of the tapes,” he said. Howland, who spearheaded the Attorney General’s early investigation into the abuse allegations— an investigation that hadn’t interviewed a single victim—teed off on Schmit: “This is ridiculous, just farcical,” retorted Howland. “It’s unfortunate that the senator feels obliged to make accusations against law enforcement…. Now they’ve got a hot potato, and they don’t know what to do with it.”
In a subsequent World-Herald article, “Schmit: Abuse Victims Fear Scrutiny,” Schmit commented on the seemingly insurmountable difficulties that Caradori faced: “If you were an abused child and you heard the reports about the original three witnesses who came forward and then you saw what happened to those witnesses, would you come forward now? Or would you just hunker down and say, ‘I’ve taken all the abuse I’m going to take’? You’d say, ‘The hell with it. There’s no point talking to anybody because they’re going to cover it up.’”
By April of 1990, Alisha Owen had taken a beating in the press, and, like Gary Caradori, she was acutely interested in finding out who exactly had leaked the tapes to the TV stations. Unlike Caradori, however, Owen had an ace to play in discovering the source of the leak: For a media personality she would have been the hottest ticket in town—her scrambled silhouette saturated the Omaha airwaves, and she resolutely shunned media attention and requests for interviews.
But in the second week of April, Owen phoned KETV’s on-air personality Mike McKnight and consented to an “off the record” meeting—York’s Visitor’s Register confirms that McKnight visited her on April 12. In a quid pro quo, Owen offered to make particular disclosures if McKnight revealed who had leaked the tapes. According to Owen, McKnight said that FBI personnel hadn’t actually leaked the tapes to the TV station—they had sold them! Though McKnight would eventually be subpoenaed to give an account of how he acquired the tapes, the subpoena would be quashed. [These are NOT the actions of a federal investigative agency,they are the actions of a STATE Gestapo,and folks are naive if they think anything has changed...no truth be told,it has snowballed DC]
In Franklin, the perception of reality intended for public consumption was basically a byproduct of the media, and the imperceptible reality generating that perception was primarily law enforcement—the wizard behind the curtain. Law enforcement’s Byzantine machinations were generally devised in stealthy conclaves, and on January 17, 1990, the top brass from the US Attorney’s Office, Nebraska Attorney General’s Office, FBI, NSP and OPD met to discuss the Franklin “investigation.” At that meeting, the FBI played its federal trump card: The FBI would conduct the impending investigation and interview the victims on “FBI terms.” [One word....Gestapo DC]
Though Caradori wasn’t cognizant of the January 17 conclave, he by now knew the meaning of “FBI terms”: the FBI would subject Alisha Owen, Troy Boner, and Danny King to an inhumane pressure cooker until they melted. Caradori steadfastly hoped that their attorney, Pamela Vuchetich, had the wherewithal to abate their upcoming trial by fire.
Caradori had investigated a child sexual abuse case for Vuchetich, and he introduced her to Troy Boner in November 1989. In December, Vuchetich consented to represent Owen, Boner, and King in litigation that might arise from their alleged abuse. The attractive thirty-five-year-old was married and the mother of two young children. Vuchetich was born in Topeka, Kansas, where her father had been a psychiatric resident at Topeka’s Menninger Institute.
Her family then moved to Lincoln, Nebraska, and she graduated from Lincoln’s Southeast High School. She studied modern dance at the University of Utah and upon her graduation took a shot at a dance career in New York. Four years later, she aborted her theatrical aspirations, returned to Nebraska, and enrolled at the University of Nebraska Law School. The self-employed Vuchetich shared a Lincoln office with her father, a practicing psychiatrist.
Initially, Vuchetich sounded dedicated to saving the children—a veritable catcher in the rye. A February 1990 World-Herald article quoted her saying that her three clients were entangled in a teenage prostitution and pornography ring centered in Omaha that included “at least 100” victims. The article reported that Vuchetich had inferred the scope of the ring from the videotaped statements of her three clients. Attorney General Spire responded that he had watched “significant excerpts” of the twenty-one hours of videotaped interviews provided by the Committee, but he had no knowledge of whether or not 100 youngsters were involved. “If she has information of that kind,” Spire said, “she should report it to authorities.” Both the US Attorney for Nebraska and the NSP declined to comment on Vuchetich’s statements.[That is a laughable statement by the AG considering what was transpiring with the three who had come forward,and the 'authorities' actions to this point DC]
A week after Vuchetich commented on the scope of the Omaha ring, she asserted that the World-Herald had misquoted her. Vuchetich told a Lincoln Journal reporter that she spoke in generalities when estimating the scope of the Omaha ring, because large child prostitution rings typically number 100 or more victims. In the Lincoln Journal article, she maintained that a “legal code of ethics” prevented her from discussing the facts of the case, and therefore, she didn’t make those comments. Vuchetich also suggested that the World-Herald’s misquotes corresponded to a pattern of sullying the Committee’s investigation. “I feel like they’ve tried to discredit the Committee and they’ve tried to discredit the investigator … and now they’re trying to discredit me,” she said. The World-Herald, though, wouldn’t budge, and its managing editor issued a statement that the newspaper had “full confidence” in the reporter and stood behind the story.
Vuchetich demanded that federal and state law enforcement give Owen, Boner, and King immunity agreements before she made them accessible for interviews. Vuchetich said the immunity agreements would enable her clients to discuss “any criminal activity” they committed as a consequence of their association with the ring without fear of prosecution. In the February World-Herald article where Vuchetich reportedly commented on the scope of the ring that had ensnared her clients, she also announced that FBI investigators had interviewed her clients because she and US Attorney Lahners had negotiated written immunity agreements.
Though I’m agnostic concerning whether or not the World-Herald misquoted Vuchetich about the scope of the “ring,” her statements about all her clients receiving federal immunity are false. By the time of that article, Alisha Owen had signed a federal immunity agreement, but neither Troy Boner nor Danny King had received federal immunity.
Vuchetich arranged for the FBI to have a go at Boner and King long before they signed federal immunity agreements: A January 25 “FBI Memorandum” remarked that FBI Supervising Special Agent John Pankonin, FBI Special Agent William Culver, and two NSP investigators met with Vuchetich at her Lincoln office, and Vuchetich consented to let the agents interview Boner the following day.
Evidently, the date to interview Boner was pushed back because a later “FBI Memorandum” stated that Culver and NSP Investigator Charles Phillips returned to Vuchetich’s office on February 1 to question Boner, who was nowhere to be found. The memo said that Vuchetich had been “working” with Boner for several days, “preparing him for the interview,” but the streetwise Boner must have had a bad feeling about the meeting—he bolted to whereabouts unknown in the middle of the night because his immunity deal wasn’t worked out and he feared arrest.
Vuchetich, however, was considerate enough to ensure that the FBI hadn’t made the jaunt from Omaha to Lincoln in vain—after Boner fled she fetched Danny King. A February 2 FBI memo related that though Vuchetich said King “was not emotionally prepared to be interviewed,” he would be willing to meet with Culver and Phillips on an “informal basis in order to begin the interview process.” The “informal,” introductory meeting lasted two and a half hours, and Culver wrote a formal FBI debriefing on the interview.
The debriefing stated that “King was told that he would not be subjected to marathon interview sessions, but instead would be interviewed throughout several sessions over a period of time.” Culver and Phillips also “stressed to King that he should not feel that he must relate the exact same story to the criminal investigators that he told Caradori on the videotape.” The above excerpts from Danny King’s initial FBI debriefing contain a falsehood and a truth: The falsehood is that King wouldn’t be subjected to “marathon interview sessions,” and the truth is that the FBI “stressed” to King that he need not stick to the story he told Caradori.
The FBI debriefings of Danny King commenced in earnest on March 1 in a hotel room. FBI Special Agents Michael Mott and William Culver interviewed King, who was accompanied by Vuchetich. The first interview lasted approximately three hours, and King basically reiterated the events as they were spelled out to Caradori. The next day, the FBI interviewed King for approximately five hours, and, once more, he relayed the events as they were given to Caradori.
On March 5, however, Danny King started to recant his story: He said the stories about the two interstate flights to Los Angeles and Kansas City where Larry King pandered him and Alisha Owen were fabricated. The debriefing stated, “King said that he has decided to be totally honest with the interviewing Agents. He realized that the telling of fabricated stories would only hinder the investigation into any abuse that had actually occurred.” So after King “decided to be totally honest,” he told the FBI agents about his sexual trysts with Alan Baer at the Twin Towers. King vowed that he and Baer had sex about twice a month for three years.
According to the March 5 FBI debriefing of Danny King, Boner made a visit to King in Omaha the night before Boner and Caradori rolled up at King’s front door. Boner, however, was lodging in Lincoln without a car. During the alleged nocturnal visit, Boner supposedly described his upcoming visit with Caradori the next day, and stated that King needed to make up stories about the two interstate plane trips with Larry King. The FBI debriefing stated that the motives behind Boner’s actions were to “sue” Larry King and Alan Baer so Boner and Danny King would “get a lot of money.” Though Danny King was initially unsure about why the fabrication included Owen, the FBI debriefing later explained that King said Owen’s motive for the fabrication was to “get herself out of jail.”
The March 5 debriefing also mentioned that “King said Alisha Owen told him to tell the investigators about an old man named Rob picking her up at her apartment on several occasions for dates.” In King’s statement to Caradori, he said that in April or May of 1986 he answered the door to Owen’s apartment to find an older man named “Bob,” who drove a blue car equipped with a spotlight. King’s March 5 FBI statement about what “Owen told him” is in glaring contradiction to the fact that Danny King hadn’t talked to Owen since her incarceration at York.
A March 6 “FBI Memorandum” is extremely bizarre indeed: The memorandum discussed Vuchetich visiting the FBI’s Omaha Field Office and meeting with Supervising Special Agent John Pankonin and Special Agents Mott and Culver, and it detailed a conversation Vuchetich had with the boyfriend of Danny King’s mother. Vuchetich said the boyfriend related that Boner, 6’3” weighing 200 pounds, requested that the frail King, 5’6” and maybe 140 pounds soaking wet, act as Boner’s bodyguard that night, which would be like Hulk Hogan conscripting Peewee Herman to be his muscle.
Vuchetich also maintained that the boyfriend informed her that Danny King suggested to Boner they recruit “another victim,” but Boner vetoed the idea because “millions and millions of dollars” were at stake, and additional witnesses “would cut up the pie into smaller pieces.” Special Agent Mott purportedly phoned the boyfriend, but he “refused to be interviewed and terminated the telephone call.”
By early March, Pamela Vuchetich definitely seemed to be molting her save-the children persona, bringing Danny King to FBI agents again on March 8. Though King pledged “to be totally honest” on March 5, he evidently wasn’t able to seamlessly assemble the opus of lies that was now required of him. For example, after he turned over a new leaf on March 5, he said that Boner imparted the fabricated stories to him on the eve of his meeting with Caradori, but on March 8 he said Boner imparted the fabricated stories as Caradori filled his tank with gas. These contradictions didn’t seem to trouble the FBI agents.
On March 8, FBI agents apparently felt that King’s singing lessons had been sufficiently honed for a recital, because they invited US Attorney Lahners and 1st Assistant US Attorney Thalken to his debriefing, and King sang the following tune: “King also told Caradori that Troy Boner had fabricated several of the incidents Boner had told him about, and Alisha Owen was not involved in any incidents at all. King said he did not wish to fabricate stories and wanted to tell the truth. Caradori kept pressuring King to tell the whole story and not be afraid. After some amount of time, King decided that if Caradori wanted to hear the story so bad, he would go ahead and tell him, at which time King participated in the videotaped interview. King included in his taped interview all the fabricated stories that Boner had told him to.”
Danny King had a final debriefing on March 21, and by then he had recanted just about everything but his name, including his recurrent molestations at the hands of Baer. The March 21 debriefing is basically a cut-and-paste of the debriefings after King became “totally honest” on March 5, but it contained a new, innovative twist: King disavowed Boner’s visiting him on the eve of his initial contact with Caradori and also disavowed Boner’s explaining the fabrications to him as Caradori filled his gas tank: “Caradori and Ormiston left Danny King and Troy Boner in King’s room while they returned to Caradori’s room. Boner told Caradori that he and King were going to take a swim for about an hour. After Caradori and Ormiston left the room, Boner and King went to the bar in the hotel where they drank alcohol and talked for approximately one hour. It was during this hour-long meeting at the bar in the Residence Inn that Troy Boner first told Danny King what he (Boner) wanted King to tell Caradori.”
The FBI debriefing’s new, innovative twist is in glaring contradiction to Caradori’s Investigative Report from December 2, the day he initially met Danny King. The Investigative Report explicitly stated that Boner didn’t accompany King to the Residence Inn—Caradori drove Boner and King to Caracorp and, as Boner walked back to his apartment, Caradori deposited King at the Residence Inn.
The final paragraph of King’s March 21 debriefing ends on a serious note: “King told the interviewing Agent and Investigator that the facts as he is now relating them on today’s date is the truth and full truth and that he was not leaving any details out or fabricating anything that did not happen. He also understood fully that he would be taking a polygraph examination later in the day and would be asked about the truthfulness of this statement. He stated that this was the truth, and he had nothing to worry about from the polygraph.” And, lo and behold, Danny King passed the FBI’s polygraph.
Troy Boner had bouts of being hard to find after his attorney Vuchetich informed him that the FBI and NSP wanted to interview him. However, Caradori’s Investigative Report from March 5 indicated that Boner phoned him that day: Boner disclosed he had a “hard time” communicating with Vuchetich and had retained a new attorney, but he wouldn’t disclose how he initially made contact with his new attorney. He also mentioned that a “friend of his” had recognized a high-ranking official from the US Attorney’s Office on TV because that official regularly cruised an adult bookstore in Council Bluffs. Though Boner wouldn’t reveal his friend’s name over the phone, he consented to meet with Caradori the following afternoon in Council Bluffs. The next day, Caradori drove to the designated location of their meeting—he waited around for an hour. Boner never showed up.
Caradori’s Investigative Report from March 9 mentioned that Boner phoned him at approximately 1:00 A.M. that morning. Boner had signed his federal immunity agreement the previous day, and he was tormented and ambivalent. Boner said that the high-ranking official in the US Attorney’s Office who frequented the adult bookstore in Council Bluffs had threatened him with perjury charges, and he was “very scared”—Boner also told Caradori that this individual had a sexual penchant for “young kids.” Boner then informed Caradori that his videotaped statement was true, but Danny King’s was false. Boner maintained that he imparted the fabrication to King the day he and Caradori buttonholed King at his apartment, contradicting King’s final account of Boner’s imparting the fabrication. Caradori nonchalantly stated that he was “sorry to hear” that Boner had changed his story, and he reminded Boner that he and King were alone for a “minute and a half” and there was “no way in hell” they “could have concocted that story” in such a short time frame.
During the March 9 phone call, a terrified Boner requested that Caradori accompany him to Omaha’s FBI Field Office later that morning. Caradori consented but insisted Boner clear it with his new attorney—Boner replied that he would immediately phone his attorney. Ten minutes later, Caradori received a call from Boner’s attorney, who conveyed that he didn’t have a problem with Caradori accompanying him and Boner to the FBI—Caradori said that he would adjust his schedule accordingly. But Caradori received a call later in the morning that specified he “would not be accepted at the FBI office in Omaha.”
FBI agents had good reason not to have Caradori accompany Boner to the FBI— Boner was being put through the wringer and would soon recant his videotaped statement. According to a 1993 affidavit of Boner’s, FBI agents subjected him to a torrent of threats, and he ultimately concluded that he must either “lie or die”— Boner’s notion of “lie or die” may sound overly dramatic but, certainly by 1993, he had rationales for such a conclusion.
For Danny King, I possess the battery of FBI debriefings that show how his original statement was methodically whittled away, but, unfortunately, I don’t have a series of FBI debriefings that show how Boner was methodically broken down. Rather, I have a nine-page, handwritten statement he composed on March 20, 1990, at the FBI’s Omaha Field Office. Boner’s statement is nearly a categorical recantation of his videotaped statements to Caradori and also in stark contrast to Caradori’s Investigative Reports, even though strands of truth are woven into it.
He jotted down that Caradori initially approached his mother, and he also confessed to his initial late night phone call to Caracorp’s answering service that patched him through to Caradori’s residence. Boner wrote that Caradori said he was an investigator for a “Special Committee” and was aware of Boner’s being enmeshed in a pandering network because of information garnered from Owen, but Boner replied that he didn’t know a Larry King and hung up the phone. The next twist in Boner’s statement is peculiar though: He claimed he phoned the Lincoln Police Department and talked to an officer who said that Caradori was a former State Trooper and a private detective, and then he made a second call to Caradori. If Boner knew “nothing” about Larry King, why would he have bothered with phoning the LPD and then Caradori once more?
When Boner phoned Caradori a second time, his statement continued, he told Caradori that Owen was “lying.” Caradori threatened to subpoena him however, so Boner begrudgingly agreed to meet Caradori later in the morning. Caradori and Ormiston initially met Boner at an overcrowded Denny’s, and they ultimately decided on a less crowded restaurant. As Caradori, Ormiston, and Boner drove to the next restaurant, Boner said he reiterated that “this whole thing was bullshit.” Caradori, though, zealously insisted it had to be true.
After their arrival at the second restaurant, Caradori gave Boner the following pitch: Larry King and company are terrible men, and Caradori would help Boner sue them for millions of dollars and also help get a friend out of jail—Boner bought the pitch and decided to give Caradori a “statement.” Boner maintained that they returned to the house where he lived, he packed a suitcase, and told his fiancée he would be home in approximately “six months.” Upon arriving at Caracorp, Caradori described an event to Boner where Larry King, Owen, Danny King, and Boner took a trip to California and “Larry King dropped off the two little boys.” Shortly thereafter, Boner related, Caradori went into an employee’s office, phoned Owen, and handed the phone to Boner: “I got on the phone and said what in the hell is going on? She said sit down and relax—she will explain. She told me to cooperate with Gary. He will help us, and we will all be rich. She told me there were very important issues I needed to remember.”
Over the next twenty minutes, Boner’s drug-addled memory supposedly downloaded all the places, locations, people, dates, times, and parties that corroborated Owen’s videotaped statements. Caradori then talked to Boner and showed him pictures for the next three hours—Boner asserted that he didn’t “recognize” a picture of Larry King until Caradori “told me who he was.” Boner then supposedly gave his six-hour videotaped statement to Caradori. The FBI then polygraphed Boner regarding his hand-written statement and found that he passed with “excellent results.”
That’s the “official” story of how a great “hoax” was hatched, but Boner’s account obviously contains an assortment of problematic details. Boner claimed he didn’t meet Owen until 1988, when they started dating as boyfriend and girlfriend. Yet he involved himself in a dangerous scheme with a former girlfriend he had known less than two years, even after they split up and he was engaged to be married to another woman. And so on.
Another problem pertains to Karen Ormiston: Boner’s statement mentioned that she was constantly at Caradori’s side throughout the entire day of November 25, 1989. And after both the state and federal grand juries had besmirched Caradori’s methodology, Ormiston flew to Los Angeles in October of 1990 to undergo a polygraph assessing if Caradori had acted duplicitously concerning the victims he videotaped. She would be polygraphed by Hollywood-based Professional Security Consultants, and her examiner was the then-President of the National Polygraph Association. As the examiner questioned Ormiston, he monitored her blood pressure, pulse, upper and lower respiration, electrodermal skin resistance changes, and her blood volume responses. In addition to control questions, she was asked if Caradori threatened the victims, coached the victims, or advised the victims to fabricate their stories. She answered “No” to these questions, and the examiner concluded “that Ms. Ormiston answered all of the above relevant questions truthfully.”
Though it is hard not to conclude that Boner’s recantation was a tissue of lies, I freely concede that these inconsistencies aren’t irrefutable proof. However, I have the phone records for Caracorp on November 25, 1989, the day the hoax was supposedly hatched. The records clearly show that no Caracorp phone calls were placed to York, Nebraska or received from York, Nebraska on that date; Caradori, like the vast majority of Americans, did not have a cell phone in 1989. Further, I possess the log of all the phone calls Owen made from York in November and December of 1989 and it shows she didn’t place a single call on November 25.
The fact that the flight to California, which entailed the sale and/or murder of a little boy or boys, according to Owen and Boner, was the first recantation of both Danny King and Troy Boner indicates that FBI agents felt it imperative to dispel that story immediately. Such a deed is so evil and divorced from everyday reality that it defies imagination, but Caracorp’s phone records prove that Boner is lying about his purported conversation with Owen, and, if Caradori didn’t coach or advise the victims, as Ormiston’s polygraph implies and Boner later confessed, Boner and Owen either conjured up this seemingly implausible story independently or they were actually privy to the horrendous event.
The FBI started making forays to York in early February 1990—York’s Visitor’s Register shows that the FBI descended upon Owen for ten “interviews” in February but, surprisingly, Owen wouldn’t give an inch, even though she was confined to segregation and isolated.
Though Owen refused to recant her videotaped statement, the forces against Caradori and the Franklin Committee must have been rather pleased as the Douglas County grand jury began its deliberations. The leaks, abetted by the media, had effectively accomplished a meticulous hatchet job on Caradori’s investigation and the victims he videotaped, and the FBI had coerced Troy Boner and Danny King into recanting their accounts of the Franklin pandering network. Moreover, the leaked videotapes of the victims, which were now ubiquitous on Omaha’s airwaves, coupled with intimidation, had terrified additional victims from stepping forward, and the US Department of Justice had ensured that Larry King was safely tucked away in a federal psychiatric facility.
Caradori realized that he had stepped into the ring with the feds, albeit a corrupt subgenus of the federal government, but his innate moral barometer wouldn’t permit him to throw in the towel. And by May of 1990, Caradori compiled a “Leads List” of 271 people who may have been the victims, perpetrators, or witnesses of child abuse. The Leads List included the names of approximately sixty underage victims of alleged abuse.
Also in May, Caradori managed to videotape a fourth victim—Paul Bonacci— whose name he had gleaned from a member of Concerned Parents. The twenty-two year-old Bonacci was incarcerated at the Lincoln Correctional Center. In November, within weeks of Franklin’s fall, he had been charged with two counts of sexual assault on a child—his victims were two boys, thirteen and nine years old. Bonacci, like Alisha Owen, claims that shortly before his incarceration he was warned to make himself scarce and to talk to nobody.
After Bonacci’s arrest, the court appointed a psychiatrist, Dr. Beverley Mead, to determine if Bonacci was a “mentally disordered sex offender”—Mead would interview Bonacci six times and conclude in an April 1990 report that Bonacci wasn’t a mentally disordered sex offender, but, rather, that he suffered from Multiple Personality Disorder or MPD. Mead wrote that Bonacci has “20 or more alternates, several of them well-formed, as much or more so, than Paul himself….” Bonacci’s alternates, Mead discovered, had an “individual identity, a different name, and certain individual characteristics.” Mead found that various alternates had heterosexual orientations and others homosexual orientations; some alternates were even color blind. Mead felt the “principal personality Paul has no wish to molest children, is quite religious, and is not inclined to have homosexual interests.”
Mead’s April report stated that Bonacci wasn’t cognizant of his MPD prior to Mead’s interviews, and “he is still mystified by the situation and finds it difficult to accept.” According to Mead, MPD is associated with a “very disorganized childhood,” where the child undergoes “severe and often repeated abuse,” and this was “quite true” in Bonacci’s case.
Born in the Omaha area, Bonacci was the second youngest of six children. His parents divorced when he was a toddler, and he had minimal contact with his biological father during his formative years. His mother’s second husband repeatedly pummeled Bonacci and his siblings—he told Mead that he remembered his stepfather chopping up the kids’ toys with an axe. Bonacci’s mother and her second husband divorced after he severely battered her.
She remarried shortly thereafter—her third husband didn’t subject Bonacci to physical abuse but simply ignored him. At the age of six, Bonacci told Mead, a neighbor repeatedly molested him. Bonacci maintained that he informed his mother and stepfather about the abuse, but they disregarded his pleas for help. In third grade, Mead noted, Bonacci began to “lose time,” i.e., have blackouts of previous activities; Mead inferred that “these were the first experiences of having an alternate personality takeover.” At the age of nine or ten, Bonacci was turned on to drugs and child prostitution—his “friends” showed him a park where pedophiles cruised for children. Bonacci would perform sexual favors for money, but he never derived pleasure from these experiences “as Paul.”
By the age of twelve, Mead wrote, Bonacci was heavily enmeshed in drugs, child prostitution, and Satanism. He attended “a lot of parties where he served as a young male prostitute.” Mead’s report on Bonacci ended on a perplexing note: “Without treatment, it is conceivable (and this is probably what happened in the contact with the little boy) that if placed in an unusual circumstance, an alternate personality might temporarily take over and commit such an act of fondling, although it is also true that such behavior will be stopped, or at least quickly checked, by another alternate personality which would disapprove of such behavior. It all gets quite complicated.”
Gary Caradori and Karen Ormiston would videotape Bonacci for approximately seven hours at the Lincoln Correctional Center. By the time they interviewed Bonacci, Caradori and Ormiston had been on an extremely dark excursion for eight months, negotiating threats and dangers and edging into maybe the darkest crevice of the human condition. Still, they weren’t prepared for Paul Bonacci, who had spent much of his life entangled in a sinister web of child prostitution, kiddy porn, Satanism, and “scavenging” for vulnerable children.
The clean-shaven, well-mannered Bonacci had thick, dark brown hair, parted to the side, and a youthful face, but his eyes revealed a horrific anguish. When Caradori and Ormiston interviewed Bonacci, he had yet to receive psychiatric treatment for his MPD—he appeared to be devoid of emotion and almost autistic throughout most of the interview as he recounted tales of unfathomable abuse.
Bonacci named the same abusers as Owen, Boner, and Danny King, and he identified the same settings of pedophilic activity—the Twin Towers, French Café, and the Run Bar. Bonacci affirmed that he met the three at the Twin Towers in late 1983 or early 1984, but added that he had several sexual encounters with Citron, Baer, and Larry King before meeting the other three.
Bonacci maintained that he first met Citron at an Omaha area amusement park when he was around eleven years old. He discussed numerous sexual encounters with Citron from 1979 to 1987, and also group-sex encounters that Citron would photograph. Bonacci was aware that Citron had lived and worked in California from 1981 to 1984, and he mentioned that Citron would occasionally fly him to the West Coast during that time. Bonacci talked about being at Citron’s house when Citron molested a number of children —Citron was charged with sexually assaulting one of the children Bonacci named. His name had never been released to the media.
Bonacci told Caradori and Ormiston that he met Baer when he was approximately eleven years old as well, and he had hundreds of sexual encounters with Baer between 1979 and 1988—Baer would lavish him with money, jewelry, and drugs for their trysts. In 1981, Bonacci said he attended his first of approximately one hundred parties at the Twin Towers. Bonacci then named several children who attended the Twin Towers parties, including Jeff Hubbell, the Boys Town student who purportedly introduced Alisha Owen to Larry King’s pandering network. Bonacci, like Owen, named Rusty Nelson as a photographer who photographed the orgies.
Bonacci also spoke of the same sadistic abuse that had been described by Owen, Boner, and Danny King. He discussed being repeatedly tied up, whipped, cut by knives, and burned by cigarettes. Bonacci showed Caradori a scar that was left by a knife wound and also cigarette burns on his arms—he claimed to have cigarette burns on his genitals, too. He recalled a party at the Twin Towers, in Baer’s apartment, where he was forced to perform oral sex in rapid succession on five adult males.
In addition to recurring molestations at the hands of Citron and Baer, Bonacci would name Larry King as both a perpetrator and a pedophilic pimp. Bonacci disclosed that King took him on possibly three hundred flights around the country as an underage prostitute, and he mentioned several nuances about Larry King or his network that were also mentioned by Owen, Boner, and Danny King. For example, he stated that Larry King was fond of kids urinating on him, corroborating Boner. Bonacci also told Caradori and Ormiston that he had personally witnessed Owen and Chief Wadman having sexual relations.
He corroborated Owen about Larry King’s African-American henchman named “Larry”—Owen gave him the impromptu moniker of “Larry the Kid,” and Bonacci called him “Larry the Enforcer.” They both described him as a muscular black male in his twenties—Owen confessed to being molested and slapped around by “Larry the Kid,” and Bonacci said that “Larry the Enforcer” had assaulted him on three occasions. Their descriptions and accounts of him were strikingly similar.
Bonacci was almost catatonic as he detailed the countless molestations he endured and the flights with King, but he actually broke down and bawled when he talked about a trip to Sacramento, California in 1985. According to Bonacci, Larry King chartered a plane that departed from Eppley Airfield, near Omaha. The plane made a stop in Grand Island, Nebraska, where King picked up camera equipment, and then they stopped in Aurora, Colorado to pick up a boy named Nicholas, who was approximately thirteen years old. The plane refueled in Las Vegas, Nevada before landing at Sacramento.
In Sacramento, Bonacci said, they rendezvoused with a “little Italian guy” whom he identified as the “producer.” The producer subsequently drove Bonacci, Nicholas, King and the pilot of the plane to a remote wooded area, where they met a few additional men, who comprised the “camera crew,” and also a young boy named “Jeremy”—the producer said that Jeremy had been kidnapped. Jeremy was jostled into a small cage, and after he was let loose from the cage, Bonacci and Nicholas were ordered to run him down and drag him back to the older men. Bonacci stated that Jeremy divulged to him that he was from Idaho—he described Jeremy as roughly twelve years old, having braces on his teeth, with blond hair and brown eyes. Bonacci sobbed when he told Caradori and Ormiston that he and Nicholas were forced to have sex with Jeremy while members of the camera crew kicked and beat the three of them—an adult male then kicked Jeremy in the face, molested him, and, as Jeremy screamed, shot him in the head with a handgun.
Following the filming of Jeremy’s murder, Bonacci said, he was transported to the hotel, where he had sex with the pilot. He described the pilot as having brownish blonde hair, a brown eye and a blue eye, a scar on his left arm, and an eagle tattoo on his chest. After having sex with the pilot, Bonacci slit his wrists in the hotel room.
Bonacci’s account of his trip to Sacramento and its aftermath was given to Caradori and Ormiston with great detail and profuse emotion. His description of Jeremy’s murder is comparable to Shawneta Moore’s account of the sacrificed children and also to Owen’s and Boner’s account of the little boy or boys in California who were either sold or murdered, a realm of evil that places absolutely no value on a child’s life. The narratives of Moore, Owen, Boner, and Bonacci beg an extremely disturbing question: Are they making up these implausible stories independently, or did they actually witness these events?
Bonacci discussed trips to Washington, DC with Larry King that also sounded improbable. Bonacci implicated King in a DC blackmail operation and said that he made numerous trips to DC with King to be used as a boy-toy for politicians and other power brokers who in turn were then “compromised.” Caradori asked Bonacci to name the compromised politicians, but Bonacci could only identify one by name —he was in the US Congress.
Before Caradori found Bonacci, OPD detectives had conducted a series of interviews with him earlier in 1990. According to Bonacci, he made many of the same disclosures to the OPD detectives that he made to Caradori—Bonacci said he gave the OPD a diary that contained detailed accounts of his abuse, named his abusers, and even contained a pornographic picture of him and Alan Baer.
But the OPD said they investigated Bonacci’s allegations about Larry King, Baer, and Citron and couldn’t corroborate the allegations. The OPD also gave Bonacci a lie detector test, which was “inconclusive,” but the investigating detectives dismissed him as a pathological liar nonetheless. Bonacci told Caradori and Ormiston that the OPD didn’t take his allegations seriously and made threats to ensure he recanted them. Indeed, Caradori was subjected to ridicule within the OPD for even interviewing Bonacci—the OPD asserted that Bonacci garnered all of his information through the “jailhouse grapevine.”
Throughout Caradori’s interview of Bonacci, he made a number of contradictory statements that Caradori duly noted. Conversely, Bonacci provided Caradori with a number of fine details that would be extremely difficult to ascribe to the jailhouse grapevine. It’s conceivable that the names of Larry King, Alan Baer, Peter Citron, and Robert Wadman could have coursed through jailhouse scuttlebutt because of Franklin’s intense media exposure and notoriety. It’s also conceivable, though less likely, that the names of Alisha Owen, Troy Boner, and Danny King could have been gleaned this way. But how would Bonacci have known about photographer Rusty Nelson, and how could he corroborate Alisha Owen on the name of Jeff Hubbell, or name one of Citron’s victims? If Bonacci wasn’t involved with Larry King, it’s exceedingly improbable he would have been able to corroborate Boner’s account of King’s penchant for “golden showers.”
In my interviews with Rusty Nelson, Alisha Owen, and Danny King, they all confirm that Bonacci attended child-sex parties at the Twin Towers—Troy Boner’s 1993 affidavit confirms this fact too. Moreover, it would have been next to impossible for Bonacci to know about Larry King’s DC activities if he wasn’t thoroughly enmeshed with Larry King—Owen, Boner, and Danny King were unaware of Larry King’s DC deeds.
Though Bonacci provided Caradori with several details that led him to believe Bonacci had been a child prostitute in the Franklin pandering network, he couldn’t account for many of his contradictory statements. On a veracity scale of one to ten, where ten represented absolute veracity, Caradori gave Bonacci a seven and a half.
Dr. Mead was called to testify before the Committee because its members wanted to understand Bonacci’s disorder and determine his credibility. Mead told the Committee that Bonacci’s contradictory statements didn’t necessarily mean he was “lying,” but, rather, they were the outward manifestation of Bonacci’s assuming completely different personalities. In other words, over the course of an interview with Bonacci the interviewer might be interacting with several different personalities, who would have different perspectives on any given event; some alternate personalities wouldn’t even be able to recall a given event, whereas others would be able to describe it in precise detail.
I’ve watched Caradori and Ormiston’s videotaped interview of Bonacci in its entirety, and his lack of emotion is consistent with untreated MPD: If he approached details that were uncomfortable or painful, he would merely switch to an alternate personality to evade those feelings. I realize that this explanation for Bonacci’s emotionless deportment may sound like voodoo psychiatry, but it is supported by extensive psychiatric literature.
On June 22, 1990, the Franklin Committee and Caradori assembled at the statehouse to discuss a number of disconcerting events and numerous frustrations. A transcript of the closed-door meeting conveys that the Committee members were shell-shocked from a flurry of media barrages and law enforcement affronts, but they were resolved to talk through their qualms and suspicions to avert descending into a collective bunker mentality.
By then, state and federal grand juries were in the process of investigating child exploitation allegations related to Franklin. During the June meeting, Caradori voiced his reluctance to furnish the evidence he was amassing to state and federal law enforcement, since he believed they were using it to sabotage his investigation. He explicitly warned the Committee that “various people in the FBI” and the NSP were deliberately hijacking the state grand jury. According to Sandi Caradori, Gary felt true heartbreak when he first realized that NSP investigators were colluding with the FBI to crush his investigation, because he had treasured his years in the NSP.
The Committee members also conversed about a strange, recurring phenomenon that plagued their prospective witnesses—they would earnestly consent to testify before the Committee, and then they would “disappear” or “refuse to show up.” A second recurring problem that the Committee discussed was that individuals who assisted the Committee suddenly found themselves clobbered by the federal government. Senator Schmit commented on the latter phenomenon: “There seems to be a tendency for those who cooperate with this Committee to suffer harsh penalties before the law.”
Though Schmit was referring to a general “tendency,” his remarks came in the aftermath of a discussion about a former Franklin Credit Union executive named Noel Seltzer, who had the temerity (or naïveté) to grant Caradori a formal interview. Seltzer had little tangible evidence to offer Caradori concerning King’s abuse of children, even though he was fairly knowledgeable about the credit union’s day-to-day financial operations. A Committee member also mentioned that she had spoken with Seltzer, and he alleged that FBI agents had warned him: “Keep your mouth shut.”
I too have interviewed Seltzer about his tenure at the Franklin Credit Union. I found Seltzer to be a decent and honest person who was evidently a victim of his own trusting and innocent nature. He unsuspectingly stumbled into the Franklin hornets’ nest and remained oblivious of the hornets until being stung. He was also relatively insulated from Larry King’s antics—his office wasn’t located at Franklin’s main branch in North Omaha, but in a South Omaha satellite.
Seltzer peddled Certificates of Deposit for the credit union, CDs that I believe he genuinely thought were legitimate. After Franklin’s closing, Seltzer would be indicted for tax fraud: He sold the CDs on a commission basis, and he claims that bookkeeper Thomas Harvey did not provide him with his income statements in 1986 and 1987, so he was forced to estimate his income for those years. Seltzer’s accusations may seem dubious, but two other Franklin executives made the same claims. The three maintained that they repeatedly requested their income statements from Harvey, but he never delivered them.
Assistant US Attorney Thalken prosecuted the three former Franklin executives. The government found that Seltzer underreported his 1986 and 1987 income by $39,780 and that a Franklin colleague underreported his 1986 and 1987 income by $98,258. Here’s where it gets interesting though: Seltzer received a very stiff penalty—seven months in prison. Conversely, his colleague, who underreported his income by approximately $60,000 more than Seltzer, was only given three years of probation, put under house arrest, and fined $1,000.
In a testament to Noel Seltzer’s naïveté, he made the mistake of handing Judge Cambridge a letter Gary Caradori had written on his behalf—Cambridge was of course the very same federal judge who had deposited Larry King “forthwith” in the Rochester psychiatric facility. In the letter, Caradori wrote that Seltzer had “provided valuable assistance in the Franklin Credit Union investigation.” He also wrote that he “found Mr. Seltzer’s information to be valid,” and he urged the judge “to consider this fact when weighing the merits of his case.”
Seltzer apparently thought the letter would stir a scrap of leniency from Cambridge, but, according to Seltzer, the judge became angry after reading Caradori’s letter. I think Seltzer’s account is reasonably corroborated by the fact that Cambridge threw the book at him. “You, in effect, by failing to file the correct 1040, stole from the US government and the taxpayers,” said Cambridge as he levied the maximum sentence on Seltzer. Cambridge also said that he felt Seltzer’s penalty “doesn’t quite fit the crime,” because the sentence guidelines “are on the low side of what the penalty should be” for tax evasion.
Prosecutor Thalken weighed in on Seltzer’s sentence too. Thalken proclaimed that if Seltzer had been honest about his tax returns, federal investigators “could have pierced this fraud that was going on at Franklin.” Thalken also said that Seltzer was only “one straw but a significant straw” in the Franklin debacle. So, Thalken, the US Department of Justice’s number-two man in Nebraska, concluded that Seltzer’s underreported $39,780 was a “significant straw” in the $40 million swindle: If Seltzer had properly reported his income, federal auditors surely would have swiftly swooped into Franklin and stopped Larry King and Thomas Harvey in their embezzling tracks!
Though Seltzer would prove to be a small, peripheral piece in the vast, intricate Franklin jigsaw puzzle, Gary Caradori applied his customary tenacity to the larger, inner pieces—like Alan Baer. Whereas Larry King emanated the gaudy aura of the nouveau riche, Baer descended from old money. His great, great uncle, Jonas L. Brandeis, founded the Omaha-based Brandeis Department Store chain in the late 1880s. Jonas Brandeis built up the chain with his three sons—Arthur, Hugo and Emil—and formed J.L. Brandeis & Sons; Jonas died in 1903 and left the company to his sons. The Brandeis brothers had a regrettable 1912—Emil Brandeis accompanied the Titanic to Davy Jones’ Locker and Hugo died of surgical complications—leaving Arthur the sole proprietor of J.L. Brandeis & Sons. Arthur died in 1916, and his son E. John Brandeis assumed the mantle of the flourishing Brandeis empire.
E. John quickly added two stories and a penthouse atop the Brandeis Building, the chain’s flagship store in downtown Omaha, and “the largest department store west of Chicago.” As Nebraskans made holiday pilgrimages to the Brandeis Building, because its window featured animated displays that were a novel attraction at the time, E. John swelled the Brandeis coffers with additional stores and shopping malls. E. John would also become a “jetsetter” well before the advent of the jet engine: He hobnobbed with the rich and famous on both coasts, took a stab at producing on Broadway, and maintained offices in New York, Paris, and London.
E. John, perched in his lofty penthouse overseeing his empire, was a high-flying symbol of the American dream, but he had a dark side. After only four years of marriage, his first wife divorced him in 1921 on the grounds of “extreme cruelty”— she was awarded a $400,000 alimony settlement. The next year, a railroad clerk sued E. John for absconding with his wife and whisking her off to the bright lights of New York. Later in the year he married again—his second wife divorced him on the grounds of “indignities and cruelty” after only a year of marriage, and she would be awarded $250,000. In three short years, E. John’s indignities and cruelties had enabled his two former wives to acquire $650,000 of his beloved wealth, a staggering sum in the 1920s, and he decisively renounced future matrimony. Moreover, bizarre occurrences were purportedly unfolding in his penthouse, including bouts of sexual debauchery with female employees and rumors of a murder.
Though E. John had a long, fabled history of frolicking, he hadn’t produced a legitimate heir to the family fortune; so he tapped his sister’s son, Alan Baer, as successor to the Brandeis fortune. Baer was born and raised in San Francisco, and, ironically, he majored in “child psychology” at Stanford University before serving in World War II. After Baer’s stint in the service, he journeyed to Omaha, where his uncle welcomed him into the Brandeis fold. Whereas the robust and swashbuckling E. John had a reputation of inveterate womanizing, globetrotting, and hunting big game in Africa, his nephew was short, scrawny, and cerebral.
Following the death of E. John in 1974, Alan Baer would prove to have the cunning of Octavian in the aftermath of Caesar’s assassination. He deftly maneuvered through protracted legal wrangling and emerged as the Brandeis potentate—he then purged Brandeis of executives who weren’t comfortable with his lifestyle. Baer would hold the purse strings of the Brandeis fortune until his death. He eschewed the pomp and circumstance of his uncle, and he seldom showed his face on the retail floors, preferring to summon floor managers to his office. On Saturdays, Brandeis employees would catch a rare glimpse of the casually dressed Baer as he made halfhearted attempts at customer relations.
E. John and his nephew had numerous dissimilarities, but they shared a runaway libido. Baer, unlike his uncle, enjoyed a long-term marriage, but the Brandeis rumor mills repeatedly churned out innuendo of Baer’s insatiable appetite for young men and even boys. Baer would ultimately earn a reputation as Omaha’s blueblood reprobate, and his plausible denials concerning homosexual trysts with minors were in short supply as Caradori’s investigation bore down upon him.
One Investigative Report mentioned that a Caracorp employee interviewed a former Brandeis executive who maintained that Baer was mortified about the “criminal aspect” of the matter, as opposed to “public knowledge” of his lifestyle or a “civil suit.” In other words, Baer coveted his gilded life, and his fear of being thrown in prison considerably outweighed any concern about his name being further besmirched. In an October 1989 Investigative Report, Caradori remarked that he had phoned Baer for the first time. Caradori later noted that the call stirred Baer to make inquiries about the investigation—inquiries that quickly ricocheted back to Caradori. Baer wanted to know if Caradori had dirt on him, and he was willing to shell out cash for worthwhile info.
After a flurry of phone calls in December, Baer and his lawyer consented to meet Caradori at an Omaha restaurant. Caradori’s Investigative Report related that they “discussed child abuse, transporting minors across state lines for sexual purposes, and drug trafficking.” Caradori advised Baer and his lawyer that he was aware of “times, dates, and locations,” and he indicated that it would be in “Mr. Baer’s best interest to contact Committee counsel, Steve Berry, in order to possibly set up an interview.”
Baer’s wealth and connections had afforded him an exquisite sanctuary from the legal consequences of his depraved lifestyle, but he also realized that Caradori was a hard-charging investigator, and Franklin was unraveling with a velocity that even a law-enforcement cover-up had difficulties outpacing. Fearing a long stretch in prison, Baer hedged his bets, and contacted the Franklin Committee to inquire about the prospect of immunity.
According to an affidavit from Senator Schmit, Baer’s queries about immunity provoked a response by the FBI that is almost inconceivable even within the context of Franklin. Schmit’s affidavit asserted that two attorneys representing Baer visited Schmit and two other individuals affiliated with the Committee in Schmit’s Lincoln office. The affidavit stated that the “two attorneys advised us with everybody present that the FBI officials dealing with them and with Alan Baer had warned Mr. Baer to ‘Keep your head down, or you’ll get it blown off, your mouth shut and talk to no one.’” [right,serving the people DC]
If the events described in Schmit’s affidavit are true, FBI agents were not above administering death threats to silence prospective witnesses. Schmit’s affidavit begs an extremely shocking question: If FBI agents were, in fact, threatening to murder prospective witnesses to cover up evidence, perchance were they actually willing to follow through on their threats?
By June 1990, Caradori had been immersed in the nightmare of Franklin for nearly a year. The nightmare included uncovering organized child abuse of a horrific nature, persistent media assaults, harassment and intimidation, and a seemingly concerted effort by state and federal law enforcement to sabotage his investigation. But Caradori realized that the nightmare also had a trap door: Federal and state authorities were possibly in the process of framing him to take the fall for scripting the child-abuse allegations.
An Investigative Report mentioned that Committee Counsel Berry received a phone call from a fellow attorney who warned him to “get out” of the Franklin investigation before he lost his license to practice law—Berry said the attorney “hinted” that Caradori had deceived the Committee by writing scripts for the victims he videotaped. A later Investigative Report noted that Caradori received a call from Owen, who made a similar claim: “She talked about the FBI hinting to her that if she changed her story … they would ‘go after’ this writer [Caradori] and Mike Casey for ‘fabricating’ the investigation.”
Gary Caradori had witnessed the FBI make short work of Danny King and Boner, fluently spinning truth into lies and vice versa. Caradori had no illusions about the truth being his ultimate sanctuary. He was also unsure if Owen and Bonacci would have the mettle to continue enduring their respective crucibles with state and federal law enforcement.
Caradori requested that the Committee defend him from the false charges that he surmised were stirring on the horizon, but the Committee declined to provide legal assistance. The following excerpt from a letter written by Berry to Caradori stated the Committee’s position: “I believe that the Committee has been very supportive of you throughout, but I do not believe that it is the function of the Committee to devote its energy to defending you.” Caradori and the Committee had butted heads before, but he felt that the Committee should have provided him with counsel, because his work for the Committee had transformed him from the hunter into the hunted.
On June 11, Caradori wrote a letter to renowned defense attorney Gerry Spence, requesting his representation. After mentioning an attorney who had approached Spence on his behalf, Caradori stated his problem: “The legal counsel for the Legislative Committee has come to me privately and informed me … I am being ‘set up’ for an arrest because of the evidence which I had discovered.” Caradori then gave a terse rundown of his investigation thus far: “In short, what we have discovered is only a small part of a nationwide child exploitation network. It is obvious that the people behind this organization are powerful and ruthless, and are going to great lengths to keep this matter contained.” He further stated that the network extended “to the highest levels of the United States,” which echoes the anonymous phone call received by Senator Schmit as the Committee was forming.
Caradori’s letter to Gerry Spence elucidated his foreboding at the might of his perceived foes, but his moral hardwiring evidently made him constitutionally incapable of conceding defeat and consigning further children to inevitable destruction. Caradori would now have to use his razor-sharp investigative skills to save his reputation and business, and, perhaps, his freedom. He needed pictures of the orgies—Alisha Owen, Troy Boner, Danny King, and Paul Bonacci all said they had been photographed.
Early on, Caradori had made a halfhearted attempt to obtain pictures through Michael Casey, but now he focused upon that goal. His search for pictures would be undertaken in extreme secrecy, and his Investigative Reports make scant mention of this quest. Caradori had agonizingly learned through trial and error that trust had to be meted out cautiously and carefully—his confidants had become few and far between.
A reporter for the Washington Times, Paul Rodriguez, had evolved into one of Caradori’s trusted confidants. King’s financial records had directed Caradori’s attention to Washington, DC, because the majority of King’s flight receipts listed DC as his destination and he also rented a DC townhouse. Caradori would discover that he wasn’t the only person investigating Larry King’s activities in our nation’s capital.
“One of the angles I was pursuing in our Washington, DC prostitution investigation were allegations that children were involved,” Rodriguez told me. “One of the names that crossed our radar was Larry King, which very quickly led us to Caradori’s investigation. Caradori’s investigation initially focused on the homegrown abuse of minors, but he said the underground network that he had been investigating was far larger than he ever anticipated.”
Following leads that might yield pictures, Caradori trolled other milieus on the West Coast and developed contacts within the occult fraternity. Paul Bonacci informed me that one of his final conversations with Caradori revolved around pictures— Bonacci told Caradori that Rusty Nelson was his best bet for pictures. Alisha Owen had also singled out Nelson as a photographer for Larry King during her videotaped interviews. Caradori commenced a hunt for Rusty Nelson.
Nelson, as I’ve noted, was my second formal interview after I leapt into the Franklin rabbit-hole. John DeCamp had arranged the interview. At first, I found DeCamp and Nelson to be rather strange allies, because DeCamp’s The Franklin Cover-Up painted an unsavory picture of Nelson: DeCamp discussed the OPD child pornography investigation into Nelson, depicting him as a “pervert,” and he also provided Caradori’s synopsis of Alisha Owen’s interview, which gave an account of Nelson photographing “group sex encounters” of minors and photographing Owen while “her hands were handcuffed and her feet were tied up.”
I talked to both DeCamp and Nelson to try to grasp their improbable association. Following the fall of Franklin, Nelson claims, FBI harassment and threats forced him to flee his native Nebraska, and he embarked on an odyssey throughout the southwest, Rocky Mountains, and California, working odd jobs and washing windows to make ends meet. Nelson eventually drifted to Oregon, where his van was pulled over and searched, resulting in an arrest and incarceration for possessing child pornography.
The “Oregon authorities” were groping for information on Nelson, and John DeCamp was the recipient of a rather astonishing phone call from Oregon law enforcement. In a 1997 affidavit, DeCamp said the following: “I, John DeCamp, received a phone call from Oregon authorities advising that they had arrested an individual named Rusty Nelson who had in his possession pornographic pictures and also a copy of The Franklin Cover-Up, which I had authored some years earlier.” DeCamp’s affidavit further stated that Nelson’s “family” phoned him and requested his legal assistance, even though Nelson had previously cautioned his family “to never let John DeCamp know where he was or how to contact him.” Nelson maintains that the FBI explicitly warned him not to talk to DeCamp.
DeCamp traveled to Oregon to determine if it would be possible to assist Nelson legally and also to peruse the pictures seized from Nelson’s van. Nelson sought clemency based upon his cooperation, but the State of Oregon put the kibosh on his request. DeCamp, however, with an Oregon detective at his side, was allowed to sift through some of Nelson’s pictures. DeCamp’s 1997 affidavit further stated that if Nelson’s pictures were “properly identified and validated,” they would “almost certainly prove the truth of the children’s stories.” DeCamp’s quest to preserve the pictures proved to be of no avail, and they were destroyed.
When I first interviewed Nelson in January of 2003, he was living in a rural Nebraska trailer park with his girlfriend. Their relationship would rupture, and Nelson would then crash at a succession of places, including his parents’ home, before he moved to the rural Nebraska trailer of a second girlfriend.
Approximately three years elapsed between Nelson’s breakup and his second romance, and I made a concerted effort to stay in touch with him throughout his various relocations. I even spent a night at his parents’ home, which was a very strange experience. Nelson’s parents are truly Ozzie and Harriet, salt-of-the-earth Nebraskans, and their son’s involvement in Franklin has brought them considerable anguish and heartache. They were acutely aware of my motives for associating with their son, but they nonetheless invited me to dinner and graciously accommodated me for the night. As the four of us had a pleasant dinner, we politely avoided discussing the topic of Franklin, even though it seemed to linger over the table like a dark cloud.
The first time I interviewed Nelson, I found him to ooze an unctuous, spooky vibe, and the story he outlined was so divorced from day-to-day Americana that it would have been next to impossible for me to listen to him without a filter of skepticism. But he came across as quite candid, and his deportment was very matter-of-fact—he didn’t feel compelled to convince me of the implausible events he discussed, which included allegations of pedophile politicians at the pinnacle of national power, Larry King’s CIA connections, blackmail, and the auctioning of children.
The events Nelson described and the politicians he fingered were explosive—I was determined to ferret out the truth. I spent numerous hours talking to him face to face and over the phone. I would buy him dinners and talk to him until the wee hours. I would put him at ease and then push him to fatigue, mentioning his previous statements, seeking additional details. To my utter astonishment, I encountered occasional discrepancies, but I didn’t catch him in any outright lies—despite Nelson’s conviction for child pornography, his history of psychiatric illness, and my earnest efforts to test his veracity.
However, another “surprise” suddenly transpired that changed my perspective on Nelson. He has an undying love of photography, and his girlfriend footed the bill for him to open a photography studio in Norfolk, Nebraska. Shortly after the studio opened for business, it was raided by law enforcement—Nelson was arrested for not registering as a “sex offender” and all of his photography equipment and computers were seized and impounded. Predictably, this event put an irrevocable strain on his romance. Once more, Nelson found himself without a girlfriend, homeless, and with absolutely no prospects of partaking in his beloved photography. He apparently lost his mind.
Prior to the raid, Nelson had largely shunned Internet “conspiracy theorists” who sought to interview him about Franklin, but now he seemed to grant interviews to all comers. As I read the articles and listened to the interviews, I was aghast—it was clear that his rage was redlined: He felt that Franklin had yet again decimated his life, and he began spewing—what I knew to be lie after lie after lie. Many of the statements he made were in direct contradiction to the statements he made to me; others, I concluded, were outright fabrications. I’ve come to believe that Nelson was never a paragon of sanity, and his involvement in these events and their repercussions had left him living on a very narrow psychological precipice—the raid on his studio served the function of pushing him over the edge.
Nelson epitomizes the problem of discerning Franklin’s truths from falsehoods: The credibility of those who extensively participated in its dark underside, and who are actually willing to talk, has been compromised by themselves and/or with a helping hand from law enforcement. That said, Nelson maintains that Gary Caradori contacted him through a “family member” when he was in New Mexico, and he agreed to meet Caradori in Chicago and slip him incriminating pictures that would blow the case wide open. Nelson gave that account to DeCamp in 1997—I have the transcripts of their preliminary telephone contacts—and he also delivered the same account to me in 2003. He’s never wavered about his Chicago rendezvous with Caradori.
On July 9, 1990, Caradori, accompanied by his eight-year-old son Andrew James (A.J.), flew his 1984 single-engine Piper Saratoga from Lincoln to Chicago. Caradori ostensibly made the jaunt to attend the July 10 Major League Baseball All Star Game with A.J., a die-hard baseball fan, whose Mets cap and baseball mitt were his most prized possessions. In a July 13 Investigative Report, Karen Ormiston remarked that Caradori made “several attempts” to contact her just prior to his Chicago jaunt, but they were unable to have a face-to-face connection—Ormiston felt Caradori had something of extreme importance to tell her that he didn’t feel comfortable discussing over the phone. Though Caradori didn’t meet with Ormiston before his departure to Chicago, his wife said he explicitly told her he would be meeting “Rusty Nelson” in Chicago before attending the All-Star Game.
After Caradori and A.J. landed at Chicago’s Midway Airport, Caradori’s hour-by hour activities are unclear prior to the game, but four sources—Paul Rodriguez, Sandi Caradori, Loren Schmit, and Donna Owen—say they received phone calls from him. His conversation with Rodriguez, who was in DC, was quite candid— Caradori unequivocally told Rodriguez that he was on the verge of acquiring pictures and other materials that would corroborate the victims’ stories. The calls Caradori placed to his wife, Schmit, and Owen didn’t overtly mention pictures; he undoubtedly thought their phones were tapped.
Caradori’s call to his wife cryptically conveyed to her that his Chicago trip had been a success. He also had a pithy conversation with Schmit that the latter relayed to a reporter: “Loran, we got them by the shorthairs.” Caradori, having talked to Alisha Owen’s parents on various occasions since initially interviewing their daughter, felt terrible about the horrors that had befallen her, and he told Donna Owen that she would be “the happiest mother in the world” upon his return from Chicago.
Nelson claims that he had left the Albuquerque area the previous day and drove through the night to meet Caradori in Chicago. “I met with Caradori briefly,” Nelson told me. “I gave him the pictures, and I got out of there.” In 2003, when I originally interviewed Nelson, he actually broke down and started to bawl as he described his rendezvous with Caradori. Prior to our first meeting, my only background on Nelson was from The Franklin Cover-Up, which cast him as a minion of darkness; I was absolutely stunned by his intense emotional outburst.
On the night of July 10, Caradori and his son A.J. attended the All-Star Game, which ended around 11:45 P.M., and they flew out of Chicago’s Midway Airport at 1:51 A.M. on July 11. Approximately an hour later, Caradori’s plane crashed in the cornfield of Harold Cameron, who lived near Ashton, Illinois. After Cameron heard the sound of a plane and then an explosion, he drove around his property, looking for the crash site. But it was dark, and the four-foot-high corn obscured the wreckage. The plane was spotted at daybreak by a medical helicopter, and deputies from the Lee County Sheriff’s Department were the first responders to the crash site, where they found the remains of Gary and A.J. Caradori.
Parts of the plane were scattered up to 1,800 feet from the fuselage, and the National Transportation Safety Board stated almost immediately that Caradori’s plane “broke up” in flight, because it was strewn over such a vast area, but the “exact mechanism” for the plane’s breakup was “unknown.” On July 12, the World-Herald originally reported that the Federal Aviation Administration’s regional air traffic control center lost radio and radar contact with Caradori’s plane at approximately 2:40 A.M., and the plane crashed between 2:40 A.M. and 2:57 A.M. The next day, however, the World-Herald reported that Cameron heard the plane explode around 2:30 A.M., and then an FAA spokesperson said that the crash occurred at 2:30 A.M.
Caradori’s crash has been the focal point of profuse speculation—both on and off the Internet. The Franklin Cover-Up only cited the call Caradori made to Schmit from Chicago—DeCamp’s book doesn’t discuss Caradori’s purported rendezvous with Nelson or the calls Caradori placed to his wife, Rodriguez, or Donna Owen. Given Nelson’s propensity to spin tall tales, it’s difficult to take his word at face value, but Caradori explicitly told his wife that he would be meeting Nelson in Chicago—I’ve known Sandi Caradori for over six years, and I find her credibility to be unimpeachable.
But even if Sandi Caradori is mistaken about her husband’s mentioning “Rusty Nelson” shortly before his departure to the airport, Caradori phoned Paul Rodriguez from Chicago and said he was on the threshold of acquiring pictures, and he also phoned his wife, Senator Schmit, and Donna Owen and cryptically conveyed that he had accomplished his Chicago objective. So if, in fact, Nelson is lying, there’s still considerable corroboration that Caradori most likely came by pictures in Chicago. Moreover, the day after Caradori’s death, Schmit told the Associated Press that Caradori had been in the process of trying to obtain pornographic pictures of the alleged victims.
The Internet is rife with accounts stating that the Lee County Deputy Sheriff who first responded to the crash site encountered a team of FBI agents, and a cornfield that was littered with pornographic pictures. I eventually tracked down the Lee County Deputy Sheriff in question, and he informed me that he was indeed the first official to respond to the crash site—he said he didn’t see a single FBI agent or pornographic picture when he initially responded to the crash.
However, farmer Cameron was huddled around the fuselage with local law enforcement after the plane was located, and he says one officer stated, “We better get the FBI involved in it.” The Lee County Coroner said that the FBI would only investigate the crash if there were signs of sabotage, and two days after the crash, the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) and the Lee County Sheriff announced that the crash entailed no signs of foul play. So it’s rather baffling that local law enforcement apparently discussed FBI involvement at the crash site.
In the July 12 article on Caradori’s crash, the World-Herald quoted the Lee County Sheriff saying there were “indications” that Caradori called in a “Mayday” before his plane crashed to the ground—a newscaster on an Omaha TV station also said that Caradori had radioed a Mayday prior to the crash. A spokesman for the NTSB wouldn’t confirm or deny a Mayday, but he said the FAA “tape” of Caradori’s radio transmissions was sent to Washington, DC to be analyzed. The NTSB ultimately announced that Caradori hadn’t issued a Mayday.
The Lee County Coroner held an inquest into the deaths of Caradori and his son. Th e World-Herald reported that the Chicago-based investigator for the NTSB testified that he “saw no evidence of an onboard explosion.” The inquest failed to find a reason for Caradori’s plane breaking apart in midair … but it nonetheless excluded sabotage. The Lee County Coroner also stated that toxicology tests conducted by the NTSB found no evidence of “drugs or foreign substances” in Caradori’s system.
I eventually acquired the toxicology report on Caradori and his son—I found that “no evidence of drugs or foreign substances” isn’t exactly false. Yet it is somewhat misleading. Carbon monoxide and cyanide testing are customary in the aftermath of a plane crash, but the toxicology report of the NTSB stated that a “carbon monoxide analysis” and “cyanide analysis” were “not performed” on Caradori and his son because of “insufficient” amounts of “tissue.” Moreover, the lab typically used by the NTSB for its toxicology analysis had certain “analytical procedures” and it wasn’t “presently operational.” So the analysis was performed by the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology in Washington, DC.
Caradori’s last statement to Senator Schmit was “We got them by the shorthairs,” and Schmit never bought the explanation that Caradori’s plane mysteriously “broke up” in flight. After the crash, Schmit said in an affidavit that he had been warned that Caradori’s life was in danger. He also wrote a letter to the NTSB regarding the backseats of Caradori’s plane that were never recovered: “I do not know anything about sabotage, but I have been told that a phosphorous type bomb would, in fact, vaporize metal and any other material with which it came in contact and that unless someone knew what they were looking for, it would be difficult, if not impossible, to detect.... I am sure there will be those who will scoff at such a suggestion, but there have been entirely too many violent deaths associated with this investigation...”
The NTSB released its final report on the crash two years after the fact. The report determined that the crash occurred at 2:21 A.M., contradicting the original statement by the FAA, and also its later statement. The report concluded that Caradori lost control of the plane “for an unknown reason,” but it cited “pilot fatigue and probable spatial disorientation of the pilot and/or an instrument malfunction” as likely “causes” for Caradori’s loss of control. As Caradori attempted to recover from “uncontrolled flight,” the report continued, the wings on his Piper Saratoga snapped off due to an “overload” of stress.
The personal effects of Caradori and his son salvaged by the NTSB were eventually returned to Sandi Caradori. A.J.’s little backpack and Caradori’s 35-millimeter camera were relatively undamaged, but the film in Caradori’s camera had been taken out and returned inexplicably developed. Caradori’s sturdy leather briefcase, a birthday present from his wife, was never returned. Ormiston told me that the briefcase was virtually an extension of Caradori—it almost “never” left his side throughout the Franklin investigation. If Caradori had scored pictures in Chicago, she felt, they definitely would have been in his briefcase.
The sudden demise of Caradori created a truly bizarre and macabre circus. Unbelievably, even in death, the World-Herald’s assault on Caradori’s credibility was unabated. A July 12 article, “Caradori Faced Criticism of Probe, Utah Firm” reported that the Utah division of his security company had committed the grave offense of employing an “unlicensed” security guard. In response to criticism for publishing a disparaging article on Caradori the day after his death, an Omaha newscaster gave the World-Herald’s rather disingenuous rebuttal: “The World-Herald defended the story saying there are people who allege foul play in the crash of Caradori’s plane … for that reason the paper is looking at all those who were critical of the private investigator.” The World-Herald reporter who bylined the article would later say that her source for the story was Pamela Vuchetich.
On the day of Caradori’s crash, several of his family and friends gathered at the Caradori home to comfort his grieving wife and son. Caradori’s death would again launch Troy Boner into the throes of tormented ambivalence, and, in the early evening, he made a stream of phone calls to the Caradori household. But Sandi Caradori was either talking to visitors or “in no shape” to talk to Boner. Later in the evening, Sandi Caradori finally took one of Boner’s calls—a tearful Boner told Sandi Caradori that her husband hadn’t dictated instructions to him during his videotaped statement. He said that threats had coerced him into recanting his videotaped testimony. Boner then voiced the same account to Sandi Caradori’s sixteen-year-old son. Boner eventually handed the phone to his mother, who also talked to Sandi Caradori—Boner’s mother reiterated to Sandi Caradori that her son had been threatened into recanting his prior statements.
After Boner’s mother expressed her condolences to Sandi Caradori, she handed the phone back to her son—Boner promised Sandi Caradori that the following day he would march into the FBI and also approach the media to set the record straight. Not hearing a peep about Boner on the radio or the television the next day, Sandi Caradori felt that his sudden surge of courage had been quelled by fear. He phoned her later in the evening, though, and said that he had, in fact, visited the Omaha FBI and told the truth, but he claimed the FBI agents he spoke to only laughed in his face. Boner also said that he talked to a television reporter who didn’t want to deal with him.
The following day, July 13, both Sandi Caradori and Karen Ormiston were subjected to a campaign of shock and awe. Ormiston found “handfuls of nails” behind the tires of a pick-up she frequently drove that was parked in Caracorp’s parking lot. Sandi Caradori somehow summoned the gumption to drive to Caracorp and assure her husband’s employees that the business wouldn’t be folding. When Sandi Caradori arrived at Caracorp, to her utter dismay, she found FBI agents standing in Ormiston’s office—her written account of that morning states that an FBI agent sporting a “smirk” introduced himself as “Mickey Mott.”
The agents descended upon Caracorp that morning and served it with a federal subpoena. The subpoena was issued on July 12, and it ordered Caracorp to surrender “any and all” of its Franklin evidence to federal authorities. In addition to Franklin evidence, the subpoena demanded a litany of additional documents— Caradori’s expenses, Caracorp’s payroll records, invoices for services billed, telephone records, checkbooks, receipts for billed and unbilled expenses, tax statements, etc. It’s interesting that the subpoena included “location of safe deposit boxes or offsite business documents storage facilities.” Perhaps the feds thought that Caradori might have squirreled away a few pictures? In response to criticism of the subpoena’s timing, US Attorney Lahners replied that it’s not always possible “to be polite.” The feds claimed they were building a “corruption” case against Caradori as a rationale for issuing the subpoena to Caracorp.
Sandi Caradori asked the FBI agents serving the subpoena if Troy Boner had contacted Omaha’s Field Office the previous day, and they initially responded that they couldn’t “confirm or deny” that information. Sandi Caradori then said that she had just lost her husband and son and deserved an answer. Her written account related that Agent Mott bent his head downward and said, “Yeah, he came to the office. But we can’t waste our time on him. He has lost all credibility.” If this is an accurate quote, it is indeed ironic that Boner would ultimately become the FBI’s star witness.
Though the FBI purportedly rebuffed Boner, he still couldn’t shake his torment. According to Senator Schmit and six other individuals affiliated with the Franklin Committee or Caracorp, Boner paid a visit to Schmit’s office on July 16 and recanted his recantation. Schmit held a press conference announcing that Boner had stopped by Schmit’s office to “set the record straight.” Shortly thereafter, however, Boner snapped back into line—he denied visiting Schmit’s office and refuted accounts that he had come clean with the FBI. In a World-Herald article, Charles Lontor, who had replaced Nick O’Hara as the Omaha FBI’s special agent in charge, even went to bat for Boner, stating that Boner never recanted his recantation to the FBI.
But Boner would learn that to whom much is given … much is expected. In the same World-Herald article where Boner was backed up by the FBI’s top man in Nebraska and Iowa, Boner declared that Owen made up the story about being assaulted by three York inmates. “I helped her make that up. I said, ‘Why don’t you say that someone hit you.’” Boner then elaborated how Owen “banged her head against the wall and hit herself on the lip.” York’s warden was incredulous of Boner’s account, because he said that Owen didn’t need to inflict bruises upon herself to land in segregation—she merely had to tell him she didn’t feel safe in the general population. You will also recall that the state Ombudsman’s office had previously refuted Boner’s charges.
The media would paint Gary Caradori as “delusional” and a “Keystone cop,” but his funeral wasn’t the funeral of a marginal character. Approximately five hundred people attended the memorial service for Caradori and A.J., and Caradori had twenty-four honorary pallbearers, including US Senator J.J. Exon and former Omaha Mayor Mike Boyle. The US Coast Guard also conducted a military tribute at the cemetery where Caradori’s body was interred.
Though the Franklin Committee hobbled along after Caradori’s demise, his death would prove to be the final coffin nail in its investigation for a couple of reasons. First, Caradori was an extraordinary investigator whose diverse talents were practically irreplaceable. Second, very few people who were affiliated with the Committee, Caracorp, Concerned Citizens, etc. felt that Caradori’s crash was an accident—they viewed it as a public assassination designed to send a message: None of you or your children are immune. According to a Chinese proverb: “Kill one man and silence one hundred.” In Caradori’s case, it was kill one man and his child and silence hundreds.
After Caradori’s death, the Franklin Committee hired former CIA Director William Colby to investigate Caradori’s plane crash. Schmit had lobbied for Colby to be appointed as the Committee’s initial counsel, but his fellow senators on the Committee overruled Colby’s appointment by a narrow margin because of Colby’s “political baggage.” By the time of Caradori’s demise, however, some of the more influential members on the Committee suspected that King’s pandering enterprise was connected to the CIA, and they felt that Colby might be able shed light on the crash.
In 1975, then-CIA Director Colby appeared before the US Senate’s Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, commonly called the Church Committee after its Chairman, Democratic Senator Frank Church of Idaho. Colby proved that he wasn’t averse to publicizing the Agency’s nasty secrets or “family jewels.” In front of a national television audience, he candidly confessed to assassination initiatives and mind-control programs that had been shrouded from the American public. Colby didn’t receive accolades for his candor, but, rather, incurred the wrath of ranking intelligence officials and President Gerald Ford—Ford fired him as CIA Director, and Colby was replaced by then-envoy to China, George H.W. Bush. Colby later wrote that he found solace in his disclosures before the Church Hearing, because he believed the CIA must be accountable to Congress and the public under the Constitution—he felt he had done the right thing, not only for his country but also for his conscience.
Given Colby’s prior candor on the CIA’s abuses of power, members of the Franklin Committee hoped he would have the means and mettle to provide a definitive explanation of Caradori’s death. But Colby wouldn’t say that Caradori’s death was a consequence of foul play—at least publicly. Writing to Senator Schmit about his investigation into Caradori’s crash, Colby stated, “I only regret that we were not able to penetrate more effectively the clouds of confusion and contradiction that have surrounded this whole case.” Though Colby wouldn’t publicly declare that Caradori had been murdered, I have been told that he apprised at least three people who were affiliated with either the Franklin Committee or Caracorp that Caradori’s death was an assassination.
In 1993, Colby also consented to be interviewed by the makers of Conspiracy of Silence, but he didn’t discuss Caradori’s death with Yorkshire Television. However, he did comment on the advice he dispensed to John DeCamp concerning his publishing of The Franklin Cover-Up: “I said you have to consider the possibility of some danger not only to your reputation but to your person.” Colby also promised to submit the Franklin Committee’s findings to the US Attorney General.
Approximately three years after Colby granted Yorkshire Television that interview, his body washed up on the banks of Maryland’s Wicomico River—he had been missing for nine days. The Maryland medical examiner’s office in Baltimore concluded that the seventy-six-year-old Colby had fallen out of his canoe as the result of a heart attack or stroke, suffered hypothermia, and drowned. On the surface, the medical examiner’s conclusions may seem rational, but Colby’s death is chock-full of enigmas.
Colby had a summer home in Rock Point, Maryland on the banks of the Wicomico River, a tributary of the Potomac. On the cold, blustery night of April 27, 1996, the septuagenarian Colby reportedly went canoeing in the Wicomico River—the winds were gusting at twenty-five miles per hour. “I don’t see why a man his age would be out there,” said a Rock Point neighbor. “If I went out there it would be in a 16- to 20-foot boat—not a canoe.”
Colby’s canoe was spotted the next day on a sand bar, but Colby was nowhere to be found. The US Coast Guard was summoned, and one of its investigators said that Colby had left his radio and computer on when he went canoeing. The investigator also said, “There were dinner items on the table.” It was later reported that Colby’s meal was half eaten, but I’m unsure if that was mere conjecture based upon the Coast Guard investigator’s saying that “dinner items” were on the table.
Colby had phoned his wife earlier in the evening—she was in Texas visiting her mother. I’ve found differing accounts of their conversation: The Associated Press reported that Colby told her he didn’t feel well, but was going canoeing anyway. The Guardian reported that he phoned his wife to say he was going to eat dinner, take a hot shower, and hit the sack. A third newspaper account stated that Colby told his wife he wasn’t feeling well, but it did not state if Colby told his wife he was going canoeing.
The day Colby’s canoe was found, Coast Guard crews started to search the Wicomico for his body. The Coast Guard ultimately scoured the river and banks for eight days with divers, sonar equipment, draglines, and dogs—Colby’s body was not recovered. Then, on May 6, Colby’s body washed ashore close to where his canoe had originally been spotted—it’s odd that Colby’s body materialized so close to the canoe even though the Coast Guard had scoured the vicinity.
The Associated Press reported that Colby’s body was clad in khaki pants, a blue and white shirt, and a red windbreaker, but he wasn’t wearing shoes. So, if the Associated Press account of Colby’s canoeing apparel was accurate, Colby went canoeing on a cold, blustery night without shoes: It was cold enough for him to wear a windbreaker, and yet he opted not to wear shoes.
I’ve discussed Colby’s enigmatic death simply because it is an integral facet of Franklin lore. According to John DeCamp, Colby disclosed to him shortly before his death that he had become disillusioned with the CIA’s use of children for sinister agendas and was determined to make the Agency accountable for its abuses. Colby, a devout Catholic, had certainly bared a number of the CIA’s abuses to the Senate. But he had balked at publicly stating that Caradori’s death was a murder. Ultimately, I am unable to provide a satisfactory explanation for William Colby’s very strange demise.
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Boys Town
