Part 3: The Franklin Scandal...A Story of Powerbrokers, Child Abuse and Betrayal....Boys Town

The Franklin Scandal...A Story of Powerbrokers, Child Abuse and Betrayal
By Nick Bryant
—Chapter Three— 

Boys Town 

Initially, I had tremendous skepticism about the likelihood of Larry King’s plundering Boys Town for underage prostitutes, because of the orphanage’s fabled history as a sanctuary for troubled youth. But as I burrowed deeper and deeper into Franklin, I started to accumulate considerable corroboration that Boys Town students had been involved with Larry King. Eulice Washington’s was the first documented account that Larry King had pandered Boys Town students—Alisha Owen, Troy Boner, and Paul Bonacci also told Gary Caradori and Karen Ormiston that Larry King had exploited Boys Town students. Caradori’s father, Leno, had been employed as a teacher at Boys Town for years—Caradori revered Boys Town. So as he started stripping off the outer veneers of Franklin, like he was peeling an onion, repeated references to Boys Town broke his heart—perhaps even more than the NSP aiding and abetting the FBI. 

Boys Town, founded in 1917 by Father Edward Flanagan, is probably the world’s most famous “orphanage,” and it has certainly become an icon of the American experience. A 1938 movie, Boys Town, starring Spencer Tracy as Father Flanagan and Mickey Rooney as a lovable, rascally delinquent, branded the orphanage into the national consciousness. The film garnered an Oscar nomination for Best Picture, and Tracy’s portrayal of Father Flanagan won him the Academy Award for Best Actor. Over the years, three additional movies about Boys Town would follow. 

Boys Town arose from humble origins near downtown Omaha to eventually become an incorporated “village” ten miles west of the city. The village of Boys Town, Nebraska has its very own zip code, post office, and police force. Boys Town, according to their June 2009 website, “provides direct care to more than 400,000 children and families each year through its youth care and health care programs at sites in a dozen states and the District of Columbia.” 

Boys Town founder, Father Edward Flanagan, was born in rural Ireland in 1886— his foreign roots made him an unlikely candidate to start America’s most famous and prosperous orphanage. Flanagan initially came to the US in 1904, studying at a seminary in New York, but he was sent back to Ireland in 1906 after a bout of pneumonia. The next year he enrolled at Gregorian University in Rome—he lasted a year in Rome before returning to Ireland because of a recurrence of pneumonia. He finally ended up at Jesuit University of Innsbruck, Austria. He was ordained a priest in 1912.

The Bishop of Omaha sponsored Flanagan’s studies, and, after his ordination, he served several parishes in Nebraska from 1912 to 1915. In 1916, he opened Workingmen’s Hotel for homeless and jobless men. Father Flanagan noticed young, homeless boys hanging around Workingmen’s Hotel, and a year later he turned his boundless energies to helping indigent children. The lore is that Flanagan borrowed $90 to rent a rundown Victorian mansion near downtown Omaha, Father Flanagan’s Boys’ Home, where he initially provided shelter to five young boys that the court assigned to him. 

The media-savvy Flanagan printed his first issue of Father Flanagan’s Boys’ Home Journal in 1918, and then he started sending letters to residents of eastern Nebraska and western Iowa, appealing for donations, which enabled him to purchase a farm ten miles west of Omaha—Boys Town’s present location. In 1926, Flanagan kicked off a weekly radio show and instituted a student government for the village of Boys Town—its mayor was elected from the student body. 

In the aftermath of World War II, Father Flanagan became a globetrotter: The War Department called upon him to tour Japan and Korea and assess the needs of children orphaned by the war. President Truman then requested that Father Flanagan travel to Europe and attend discussions about orphaned children in the European theater of war. He accepted Truman’s assignment and made a journey to war-torn Berlin, Germany, where he died of a heart attack in 1948. He was entombed on the grounds of Boys Town, and President Truman even laid a wreath on his tomb. 

Monsignor Nicholas Wegner, a native of Nebraska, sat at the helm of Boys Town from the time of Father Flanagan’s death until 1973. Under Father Wegner, Boys Town doubled in residents, and expanded its educational, vocational, athletic and arts programs. But it was also rocked by a financial scandal: In 1972, the Omaha Sun found that Boys Town was hoarding vast assets, reporting it had a net worth of $209 million. At the time of the scandal, Boys Town only had approximately 900 residents; so the enormous wealth amassed by the orphanage was rather jarring to the newspaper’s readership. The Omaha Sun’s exposé on Boys Town would be awarded the 1973 Pulitzer Prize. 

The scandal marked the end of Wegner’s tenure at Boys Town, and Father Robert Hupp replaced him. Hupp made a pair of sweeping reforms during his twelve-year reign as Boys Town’s Executive Director: He replaced Boys Town’s dormitories with the Family Home Program, where residents lived in homes supervised by married couples called “Family-Teachers,” and the orphanage also began admitting girls. 

Various sources have informed me that Hupp was a heavy drinker and actually only the titular head of Boys Town. While Hupp sat at Boys Town’s helm, I’ve been told that he delegated wide-ranging responsibilities to those administering the sweeping changes of the Family Home Program. 

When Hupp appeared in Conspiracy of Silence, he had the red, bulbous nose indicative of a heavy, heavy drinker. As the makers of Conspiracy of Silence questioned Hupp about Larry King’s ties to Boys Town, he was vague and evasive. But documentation collected by Gary Caradori demonstrated that King forged ties to Boys Town during Hupp’s tenure. Caradori interviewed a former paramour of King’s who had been a Franklin executive, and he provided Caradori with a July 20, 1980 letter written by Boys Town’s Director of Finance and Administration. The letter was in response to a proposal by King whereby the Franklin Credit Union would “provide counseling services” for people being displaced by Boys Town building an alternative school near the site of their dwellings. 

A second document provided by the former executive, “Deposit Update,” was handwritten and dated April 21, 1981. The document listed various corporations that either made deposits in the Franklin Credit Union or the credit union anticipated their deposits: The document stated that the credit union “anticipated” a $1 million deposit by “Boys Town, Fr. Hupp.” The former executive didn’t tell Caradori whether or not Boys Town, in fact, put up the money. I attempted to interview the former Franklin executive, and our conversation lasted perhaps twenty seconds before he hung up the phone. 

When I interviewed Father Hupp, he said that Boys Town had “some money” in the Franklin Credit Union, but, being told that the investment was potentially risky, he ultimately pulled out the funds. So there’s a discrepancy between the former executive’s paperwork and Hupp’s recollection. Former Franklin executive Noel Seltzer told both Yorkshire Television and me that Boys Town had more than one account at Franklin. Father Valentine Peter would later say that Boys Town had $31,000 in the credit union that Hupp was responsible for depositing, again contradicting Hupp’s recollection. Ultimately, the financial relationship between the Franklin Credit Union and Boys Town is quite fuzzy. 

Hupp essentially described a coup d’état orchestrated by Omaha’s Archbishop that deposed him as Boys Town’s Executive Director. Hupp told me the Board of Boys Town had pledged that he would be allowed to spend the balance of his days living on the Boys Town campus after his retirement, but the Bishop reneged on that agreement. 

After Father Peter replaced him, Hupp told me, he eventually became persona non grata at Boys Town, and the Boys Town police were actually ordered to arrest him if he was spotted on campus. He also told me that Boys Town employees who were seen talking to him were summarily fired. “I found out later that anybody who associated with me lost their job,” he said. “Everybody was scared to death to say one word to me. Father Peter didn’t want me around period, so I didn’t trust the whole situation after I left. I told the Bishop that something’s going on out there, but I reached a point where I didn’t trust the Bishop either. I was told by the Bishop to mind my own business and stay out of it.” I found Hupp’s disclosures disconcerting. 

I interviewed Hupp within a week of his move from Omaha to a little cabin in Necedah, Wisconsin. He felt as though he had been exiled, and he sounded extremely bitter, which I believe provoked his unprecedented candor and his disparaging comments about Father Peter. I phoned Hupp a number of times after our initial conversation—I left messages for him, but he never returned my calls. In a World-Herald article, published on August 23, 2003, Father Hupp declared that he and Father Peter had “ironed everything out.” Given my interview with Hupp earlier in the year, I was extremely surprised by his conciliatory statements. Two days after the article appeared, Hupp died at the age of 88, reportedly of a viral infection. 

I acquired Gary Caradori’s “Leads List” on my first trip to Nebraska, and it contained names of several former Boys Town students who were the alleged victims of abuse. Upon my return to Nebraska, I commenced a search for additional victims. By my standards as a freelance writer, the previous year had been lucrative for me, and I had the resources to spend a couple of months on the road without fear of ending up with financial worries. 

Before I revisited Nebraska, I phoned Dirk and broached the subject of a second visit. Though we were old friends, I was unsure of his response because of the bizarre death threat I received on my initial visit. He had become convinced though, and offered to put me up without reservation. I was very grateful for his hospitality. 

Prior to returning to Nebraska, I performed database searches on many of the alleged Boys Town victims, generally gleaning a number of addresses for each. When I returned, I quickly discovered that the alleged victims were extremely nomadic: All the addresses I had collected were obsolete. Moreover, most of the addresses were far more Skid Row than Park Avenue. 

The first former Boys Town student on the Leads List I managed to locate was David Hill. Caradori’s own investigation hadn’t identified Hill as a victim of abuse, but, rather, his name had come up in the Julie Walters report. Tracy Washington had picked out Hill’s picture in a Boys Town yearbook—she identified Hill as a Boys Town youth she claimed she had seen at Larry King’s home—and Caradori incorporated that information into his Leads List. 

One of the addresses I had for Hill was the home of his mother and stepfather in North Omaha. It was a blistering hot day in late August when I knocked on the porch door of his mother’s wood frame, ramshackle house. I knocked on it a few times without a response before circling the house and knocking on the back door. 

His mother came to the door—I introduced myself and told her that I was a journalist looking for her son. She was middle-aged, African American, and wearing a maroon housedress. Hill’s mother looked me up and down—she was extremely suspicious and brimming with questions. I told her that I was writing a story that pertained to Boys Town and that I would like to talk to her son. I attempted to ease her suspicions by superfluous small talk before giving her the number of my cell phone. 

Though I was uncertain if I had managed to abate her suspicions, David Hill phoned me the next day, late in the morning, with a swarm of questions—I told him about the story and offered to buy him lunch. He took me up on the offer and gave me the address of his girlfriend’s apartment, where he was residing. His deep voice and the fact that he lived with a woman took me by surprise. At that point, I had a synopsis of Jerry Lowe’s synopsis of the FBI interviews of alleged victims. And though the synopsis of the synopsis didn’t note an interview with Hill, it contained an interview of a classmate who was an alleged victim of Larry King. Hill’s classmate denied all connections to Larry King, but he told FBI agents that he “recalled a young man by the name of David Hill from Omaha being the ‘Number one drag queen on campus.’” The classmate also described Hill as “swishy.” Given the classmate’s depiction of Hill to the FBI, I anticipated meeting a Rupaul clone that day. 

I found Hill waiting for me when I pulled up to his girlfriend’s apartment, and he appeared to share no similarities with Rupaul other than being African American. He was approximately 6’1” and weighed a stout 235 pounds. He wore a faded blue T-shirt, silvery jogging pants, and beat-up Nike high-tops. I rolled down the window, poked my head outside, and said, “David?” He nodded, walked around to the passenger’s door, and climbed into the car. 

Initially, Hill wasn’t very talkative and seemed somewhat hostile. I asked him where he wanted to eat, and he suggested a fast food restaurant in North Omaha. As we ate, I posed a few questions to him, but he was unwilling to answer any. I sensed that Hill had a big-time problem with drugs, and his street ethos made him apprehensive about answering questions. In addition to having a crack addiction, he was unemployed and had also served a prison stint for robbery. 

After lunch, I suggested that we drive over to Boys Town, and he consented. I had never been to Boys Town before, and, as we drove around the campus, its handsome brick buildings and impeccably manicured lawns impressed me—Hill had me park next to an administrative building. We walked over to the Alumni Center in the Hall of History, where the yearbooks were stored. Hill paged through the yearbooks from the early and mid-eighties when he was a Boys Town student. 

He had been a football player for Boys Town, and one of the yearbooks singled him out for an outstanding game where he scored two touchdowns. He had completely forgotten about the game, and as he read about his athletic feats he was infused with fond memories—it was the first time that he smiled and showed the slightest signs of mirth. With the yearbook in his hands, he recounted the game aloud to me. A big smile creased his face, and he repeatedly flashed his gold incisor. 

He said he was a second stringer at the time; but the first stringer fumbled the football one or two times early in the game, and the coach pulled him out and put Hill in the game. I almost broke out laughing when Hill mentioned the name of the benched first stringer—he had been the very same student who made the disparaging remarks about Hill to the FBI. I opted not to tell Hill that his former teammate still harbored a major grudge against him that had been unleashed during an FBI interview. 

After Hill paged through a few yearbooks and relived his bygone gridiron glory, we walked over to the football field—his chilliness was starting to thaw. The Boys Town football team was practicing, and we watched them for a while. I spotted a cluster of footballs piled up; so I walked over to the coach and asked him if Hill and I could toss one of the balls around, and he said, “Sure.” I have little impulse control when it comes to footballs: I love to throw footballs around, despite rotator cuff surgery years ago.

Hill was up to the task, and we played catch for about fifteen minutes. It was stifling hot though, and Hill tired out relatively quickly. I thanked the coach for lending us a football, and then we walked back to my car. After we climbed into my car, Hill said that he needed to run back to the Alumni Center real quick, and I told him to go for it. I thought that he wanted to inquire about getting a copy of the yearbook that featured his gridiron exploits. 

He returned to the car maybe ten minutes later. He held up an alumni book, smiled, and asked, “What are you willing to pay for this?” “Let me think about it,” I said, backing up the car. I really grew to like Hill, but he took every conceivable opportunity to extract money from me. 

Hill suggested that we stop at a park, and we walked to a park bench. After our jaunt to Boys Town, Hill started to open up with me, but he refused to talk about his sexual exploitation unless I paid him $500. As we sat on the park bench, he repeatedly attempted to have me shell out $500, but I absolutely refused to pay him for an interview: I had hopes of selling the story to a magazine, and I didn’t want to taint the interviews by the slightest suggestion that I had swayed interviewees with cash. 

After maybe an hour on the park bench, we came to a stalemate on the interview, and we eventually drove to a Chinese restaurant and had dinner. I then drove him to his mother’s house, where he consented to be interviewed—without charge. As twilight retreated to night and the sound of crickets, I interviewed Hill on the front porch’s threadbare couch. Hill told me that he had two stints at Boys Town: His first stay was from 1979 to 1981, and his second was from 1983 to 1985. Hill said he was kicked out of Boys Town in 1985 due to his use of drugs. 

Though Hill denied being molested by Larry King or anyone affiliated with King, he did tell me that an older student molested him during his first year at Boys Town, when he was thirteen years old. The older student had a managerial position in the Boys Town house where Hill lived, and Hill had sex with him on a handful of occasions. Hill maintained that his liaisons with the older student enabled him to have privileges that weren’t afforded to other students. But the molestations by the older student caused Hill considerable inner turmoil, and he eventually approached his Family-Teachers about the matter. His Family-Teachers referred Hill to a Boys Town priest named Father James Kelly—Hill said Father Kelly then molested him. 

During the interview, I doubled back on Hill and asked him a number of questions about Larry King. He continued to deny any affiliation with King, but he recalled a Boys Town student working for King off campus. After I interviewed Hill, I offered to give him a ride to his girlfriend’s apartment, but he opted to stay at his parents’ house. The day had been very taxing, and I was exhausted; so I drove back to Dirk’s apartment and crashed. 

Hill phoned me in the middle of the night, but I had turned off my phone. He left a voicemail telling me that he had buried his molestations at Boys Town in the distant recesses of his mind, and the turbulent emotions that were let loose by our interview prevented him from sleeping that night. I phoned him the next morning, agreeing to pick him up later in the afternoon. 

He had made it to his girlfriend’s, and I picked him up at her place. He was hungry and wanted me to stop at Burger King. After I bought him lunch, we proceeded to a supermarket, where I bought apples and oranges. The thought of fast food on back to-back days was extremely disagreeable to me—Hill couldn’t get over the fact that I would choose fresh fruits over a Whopper. 

As we ate a late lunch, he talked to me about the abuse he had suppressed for years. I found Hill to be very sharp, articulate, and outgoing, but the suppressed molestations were a ball and chain that he lugged everywhere—he lugged them into crack addiction and also into a prison sentence for robbing a pizza delivery man. No matter how much crack he smoked, he couldn’t shake the ball and chain. His early familial circumstances, drug addiction, incarceration, and the molestations had wrecked his enormous potential. If Hill hadn’t been subjected to so many factors that gave him a ground-level glass ceiling, I think the sky could have been the limit for him. 

I also realize that people have free will and the ability to create their own destiny, but Hill’s sexual abuse and drug addiction had forged a steel-trap denial. I’ve talked to other people engulfed by horrendous childhood misfortunes and drug addiction, and their denial is so pervasive that it’s practically a psychosis. They can be living in a cardboard box, scavenging for crack every day, and yet they think self respecting people living in the workaday world are absolutely crazy or mere chumps. Such is the power of denial. 

As Hill and I talked, I pulled out Caradori’s Leads List and let him give it a gander. He was familiar with most of the former Boys Town students on the list. Hill also spotted an individual on the Leads List who wasn’t a Boys Town student, but who worked at a bar in North Omaha—so off we went. The bar had red shag carpeting and wood paneling, and, as I looked around the place, I felt like I had entered a time warp to the 1970s—Hill and I took a seat at the counter. I was the only white guy in the establishment, and I thought I probably reeked of cop. 

Hill and I parked at the bar for a few hours, and he eventually started to chat up the bartender, who was a woman in her late twenties or early thirties—he certainly had the gift of gab. Hill and the bartender had a few common acquaintances, and she warmed up to him rather quickly. She told Hill that the individual we were looking for would be in the following day. 

When we departed, I left a sizeable tip for the bartender, hopefully ensuring she wouldn’t forget me. I planned on returning to the bar the following night with Hill. But the next night he was nowhere to be found—I went to the bar by myself. It was a Friday night, and the place was hopping. I was the only white guy in the crowd, but I noticed a couple of white women—the bartender had little difficulty recognizing me. I sat at the end of the bar, and, unbeknownst to me, I had pulled up a barstool next to one of the bar’s proprietors. 

In that environment I must have appeared to be a walking and breathing non sequitur; so the co-proprietor took an interest in me, and we started to talk. After I told him I lived in New York, his interest in me ascended an octave or two. He was a retired New Jersey Transit bus driver, who had moved to Omaha a few years earlier and parleyed his nest egg into co-ownership of the bar. One of his routes had been from New Jersey to the City of New York’s Port Authority, and he quizzed me a bit about certain nooks and crannies of the City to test my veracity—he quickly concluded that I was being truthful, and we talked for an hour or so. I learned that the individual I was looking for had just been fired. 

Though I established a rapport with the bar’s co-owner, I didn’t feel comfortable with abruptly hitting him up for his former employee’s number—I intuited it would backfire on me. Moreover, the bartender was very busy, and I didn’t want to interrupt her. So, again, I left the bartender a sizeable tip and planned to return the following night. The next day I phoned David Hill at his girlfriend’s, but he hadn’t come home the previous night and she was very upset with him. I listened to her vent a litany of frustrations about him, and I concluded that he wasn’t long for his current relationship. 

On Saturday night the bar was again hopping. I sat at the counter and watched the bartender skirt back and forth. I didn’t spot the co-owner, and the bartender was in the midst of mixing drinks in staccato flurries—she looked way too busy for me to bother her. Just as it seemed I would burn another night at the bar with no results, the bartender dashed by me—she smiled and dropped a piece of paper in front of me. It was the phone number I sought. I left a third sizeable tip before leaving. 

The individual whose number I garnered was one of three brothers linked to Larry King. I even noticed his name on a few of King’s chartered planes’ passenger manifests—it was rare to see a name other than King’s on a passenger manifest. King had also leased a sports car for one of the brothers—the same sports car that had reportedly been seen on the Boys Town campus and driven by Boys Town Family-Teachers. I phoned the individual the next day—I think he may have felt violated because I had managed to glean his cell phone number. We had a very brief conversation, and he was exceptionally caustic—I quickly concluded that Antarctica would melt before he gave me an interview. I had spent three nights in a bar for a one-minute conversation—such is the nature of this story. 

Hill and I did eventually manage to converge—I bought him dinner, and he looked the worse for wear. I assiduously try not to give advice: As the Greek playwright Aeschylus wrote, “It is easy when we are in prosperity to give advice to the afflicted.” But I told Hill that his addiction was like wrestling with an alligator—the wrestling is only over when the alligator decides it’s over, and that’s usually after you’ve been devoured. He didn’t react with hostility and actually agreed with me, even though changing his ways wasn’t yet in his repertoire. 

I also told him that I had returned to the bar on two subsequent occasions, and managed to acquire the former employee’s number. I said I phoned him and quickly got nowhere. Hill was disappointed with me for reaching out to the individual without his help, but I replied that he was MIA, and I didn’t have time to wait around in pursuit of leads—I had to seize the moment. 

After dinner, we walked back to my car, and I pulled out the Leads List again. A second person that jumped out at Hill was Fred Carter—he had been a roommate of Hill’s at Boys Town, and his name and number were in the alumni book that Hill provided me. I handed my phone to Hill, and he gave Carter a call—Carter was a 1983 graduate of Boys Town, and hadn’t talked to Hill in twenty years. Needless to say, Carter was quite shocked to hear from him, but they spent about ten minutes getting caught up with each other. Hill eventually informed Carter about me and then handed the phone over to me. I talked to Carter for a few minutes—he had a number of questions for me. After I answered his questions, I asked him if I could phone him in the next couple of days—he said that was no problem.

I passed the phone back to Hill, and he wrapped up his conversation with Carter. Hill said that Carter had successfully campaigned to be the “mayor” of Boys Town, and he knew “where all the bodies are buried.” I contacted Carter after our introductory conversation, phoning him on a landline so I could record the conversation. He had attended a prestigious college after Boys Town, currently resided in Ohio, and had a lucrative day job. Carter inquired if I had a vendetta against Boys Town, and I replied absolutely not—I had a vendetta against child abuse. 

My answer seemed to satisfy him, and he gave me an interview. Carter said that he was cognizant of Larry King’s plundering of Boys Town while he was its mayor. 

“It would surprise me if a lot of the kids participating in this Larry King situation would say anything against him to this day, but back then, they would never have said anything,” Carter told me. “There were certain kids that had the look and marketability, and it was about the money. These were generally the tough kids, and they knew what they wanted and what they wanted to do. They didn’t care about the rules and what Boys Town was trying to do, or, I should say, what their individual Family-Teachers were trying to do. These were the type of kids that bucked the system every chance they could, and King capitalized on them.” 

Carter didn’t know about King flying kids out of the state, but he knew about King’s “parties” in Omaha and said that Boys Town students recruited other Boys Town students for King. He told me that allowances were a principal means for Family-Teachers to control the kids in their charge, but the funds that the Boys Town students received from King severely crippled any ability to control the kids. 

“There were instances where a Family-Teacher would say that you haven’t done what you were supposed to do, and you get no allowance,” recalled Carter. “To some of the kids it didn’t mean anything, because they knew they could get a few dollars doing other things. A lot of Family-Teachers lost control of certain kids because there was nothing to hold over their heads about getting money or privileges.” 

Like Hill, Carter also alleged to me that Father James Kelly molested him. He said he had a solid support group that enabled him to put it “aside” and move on. “If you don’t put it aside, it’ll destroy you.” Carter didn’t directly implicate Father Kelly as being in collusion with King, but he said Kelly would give kids privileges they didn’t deserve. “Father Kelly was very instrumental in getting the Family-Teachers to give kids certain privileges—whether they earned them or not. Family-Teachers are not going to deny a priest or the ministers out there pretty much anything—if they call and put in a good word for you, you can pretty much bet that you’re out of whatever trouble you had got into.” 

I asked Carter if he thought Father Hupp knew about King’s preying on Boys Town students, and he reinforced the view that Hupp was a “figurehead” or titular frontman for the organization: “Father Hupp primarily allocated funds and raised funds for Boys Town, but Dr. Lonnie Phillips was the man where the buck stopped. If Dr. Phillips didn’t want an issue to make it to Father Hupp, it didn’t go further than Phillips, and you better not take it further.” Phillips was the architect for Boys Town’s facelift in the 1970s, and Carter told me that he called a lot of the behind the-scenes shots at Boys Town. I eventually attempted to contact Phillips, but he was deceased. 

I also asked Carter if he was aware of Boys Town students informing the administration about King—he replied that he knew of kids approaching the administration about molestations, but not pertaining to King. Though Carter told me he knew nothing of Boys Town kids being on interstate flights, he corroborated Eulice Washington, Alisha Owen, Troy Boner, and Paul Bonacci concerning Larry King’s plundering of Boys Town. 

A second Boys Town student on the Leads List that Hill had befriended was Tony Harris, who was a 1981 graduate of Boys Town—a former Boys Town employee provided Gary Caradori with the names of both Carter and Harris. Harris had been an all-star running back for Boys Town’s football team and also shone as a sprinter for the track team. Harris was four or five years older than Hill, and Hill looked upon Harris as an “idol.” Hill gave me an awestruck description of Harris’ athletic feats and his physical attributes, and he was surprised to see his name on the Leads List. 

Hill and Harris had actually “partied together” several times after both left Boys Town, but they had gradually lost touch with each other. Before my return to Nebraska, Harris had been one of the alleged victims I had performed a database search on. The most recent contact info I had for Harris was in Kansas City. While in New York, I had phoned the number and reached an elderly woman who was quite curt—she said there was no Tony Harris at the number and hung up on me. 

Hill told me that Harris had a couple of children by a former lover who lived in Omaha—we set out to find her. Hill eventually learned that she worked at a fast food restaurant in downtown Omaha. We popped in a few times and, over the course of two days, finally managed to catch her—she gave Hill a phone number for Harris. I was a bit nonplussed when I realized that the phone number she gave Hill was the same phone number I had retrieved from the database search. 

I handed Hill my cell phone, and he phoned the number nonetheless. It turned out that the number belonged to Harris’ grandmother. Hill and Harris’ grandmother had a protracted conversation—Hill once again exhibited his gift of gab. Harris’ grandmother would tell Hill that Harris lived somewhere in Kansas City—she said that he checked in with her every now and then. Hill gave Harris’ grandmother the phone number of his girlfriend, but we hadn’t heard from Harris by the time I ventured back to New York. 

Before I left Omaha, I bought Hill a phone card, and we worked out a financial arrangement. For every name on the Leads List that he arranged for me to interview, I would give him $100. I felt $100 was the right amount, because it was enough to provide an incentive, but not enough for him to enlist accomplices for some scheme. 

After I returned to New York, Hill kept in touch with me. He called me periodically to tell me about his rocky relationship. Once he left a voicemail and, when I returned the call, I talked to his girlfriend because he wasn’t home. She said she had major concerns about his drug abuse, but she loved him dearly and didn’t want to end their relationship. 

A month or so after my departure, Hill phoned me and said that he had just heard from Harris. Hill talked to Harris about me, and Harris consented to be interviewed. I asked Hill whether or not Harris had disclosed to him that he had been affiliated with King—Hill replied that Harris didn’t give him a yes or no; he just said he was willing to talk. I was in the midst of various writing assignments—I told Hill that I couldn’t possibly break away until late December or early January. 

After I completed the assignments, I spent Christmas with my grandmother in Minneapolis; shortly after Christmas, I drove a rental car to Omaha. By then, Hill’s girlfriend had reluctantly booted him out of her apartment, and he was flip-flopping between a homeless shelter near downtown Omaha and the couch in his mother and stepfather’s living room. Upon my arrival in Omaha, I initially stopped by their house, but they hadn’t seen him in three or four days—I drove to the shelter and looked for him. The shelter’s personnel couldn’t provide me with his whereabouts either, so I made inquiries among the shelter’s residents. 

Hill’s street name was “Squeaky,” and one of the residents gave me a probable location for him: It was a fleabag motel near the shelter. Actually, a fleabag motel is being charitable—the place was a decrepit crack-house. After I walked over to the “hotel,” I took a deep breath, opened the door, and walked inside. I was immediately accosted by a rather foul stench and three crackheads who weren’t very gracious—a woman flanked by two guys. They ordered me out—I inferred that they were managerial types. Crack addiction was carved on their faces like twenty miles of bad road. The three were emaciated and wearing T-shirts, even though it was relatively cold outside. I quickly discerned that they didn’t have weapons, and I felt I could take my time. 

I initially asked them, very politely, if “Squeaky” was about, but they hollered at me to leave. Apparently, they felt my fashion statement was out of place. I glanced around and yelled Hill’s first name and also his street name a few times as the trio moved within four feet of me. I then realized that the situation was on the verge of escalating to violence and decided to split. 

I left messages for Hill with his parents and the shelter personnel, and he phoned me the following day. We agreed to meet at his parents’ house and then embark for Kansas City. When we met, he looked fatigued and depleted—it was disheartening to see him in such rough shape. I felt that Hill, addiction and character defects aside, was a decent guy, and his potential was vast if he cleaned up. 

We stopped at a McDonalds before hitting the Interstate, and I bought Hill “lunch.” Harris didn’t have a phone, so Hill called his grandmother, and she gave us directions to his place. When we arrived in Kansas City, we became hopelessly lost. Hill phoned Harris’ grandmother and she met us in a beat-up blue Chevy—we followed her to Harris’ house. Harris and his girlfriend lived in a two-story, brick house that was in a poorer neighborhood. Harris’ girlfriend had a second-shift job, and Harris was unemployed. After being a star athlete at Boys Town, he had floundered, spending time in the army and also in prison for robbery. 

We thanked Harris’ grandmother and said good-bye—Hill knocked on the door and Harris quickly stepped outside. The forty-year-old Harris was a trim 6’2”; he wore a white T-shirt tucked into his blue jeans. Harris had the looks and physique of a topnotch male model who had aged gracefully. He and Hill hugged, and then Hill introduced me; we followed Harris into the house’s living room. The house was well-kept, and pictures of Harris’ children adorned a corner of the living room. Harris pointed out the pictures like any proud father. After Hill and I studied the pictures, we sat on the couch, and Harris seated himself in a facing chair.

Hill and Harris bantered back and forth—small talk mostly. They eventually touched on an event that transpired years earlier in Omaha. They were relatively cryptic, but I discerned someone had snitched on someone—I was never able to find out who snitched on whom or what the event entailed. After they discussed the event, a long silence descended upon the room, and they both looked at me—it was my cue. I told Harris about my investigation and myself. Maybe I touted my bona fides a bit too strongly, because Hill said, “If you weren’t righteous, you wouldn’t be here.” 

I told Hill and Harris that my questions to Harris might be awkward, and I suggested that Hill go upstairs and play games on Harris’ computer. They agreed with me—Harris accompanied Hill upstairs before returning to the living room. He then sank into the chair next to the couch, leaning forward and folding his hands into his lap. 

Harris said he had attended Boys Town for three and half years, and in his junior year a fellow student conscripted him for King’s pedophile network. 

“The only place I flew was to Washington, DC, but I had opportunities to fly to other places,” he told me. “I would say that there were five to ten kids on a flight and about half the kids were Boys Town students. The gatherings would be in people’s houses or hotel suites. The men there would want things done to them sexually or they would want to do things to me sexually. The minimum I would get is $100, but I could get up to $500.” 

Harris said that he was “baited” and “reeled” into participating with King. On his first junket to DC, he recalled that King and the student who conscripted him stated that his participation was optional, and he didn’t perform any sexual acts. Though he didn’t participate in the sexual activities, King gave him some money nonetheless. Harris maintained that King promised him far more money if he participated. On the next junket he did participate, and he continued for the next two years. 

“Appearances can be deceiving, but these men appeared to be well-distinguished gentleman of the upper echelon, very prominent types,” Harris remarked about the men at the parties. “They wore jewelry and had nice tailor-made suits, leading me to believe that they were high-society type men. They would pick and choose the kids by mingling over to you and starting a conversation. I was under the impression that Larry King had already set it up. The men and King had their little arrangement, and anything beyond that was on the gentleman. Depending on how you performed, they sometimes offered you an additional gratuity.” 

Harris claimed he flew to DC about once a month while he was a Boys Town student. He told me he declined several junkets, because of athletics and also because he only participated when he needed cash—“If I needed money, I knew where to go.” He said the trips with King really didn’t bother some of the Boys Town students, and they became frequent flyers. “Some of the kids who liked it did it all the time, and then there were other kids like me who were only in it for the money. Some kids did it one time and that was it.” He also told me that drugs were ubiquitous at the parties—the older men had a big-time affinity for cocaine. 

When I first watched Conspiracy of Silence, and Boys Town was repeatedly mentioned, I wondered how the kids were able to just up and leave the campus for a weekend—I posed this question to Harris. “I specifically don’t know how it was arranged, but it was taken care of—it wasn’t difficult for me to get off campus. Plus, you were compensated very well to keep it hush-hush. I got a lot of perks at Boys Town for my participation with King. I’m sure my house parents don’t know about King and me to this day.” He also said that King issued very dire threats about talking: “You do not want to discuss this with anyone, and if you do there will be consequences out of our control.” 

Harris, like Carter, felt a loyalty to Boys Town, even though he felt King treated him as if he were “a piece of meat” and exploited him. “I don’t want to tarnish Boys Town’s name, but that hush-hush needs to stop. It’s amazing that it happened period, and especially with such ease. It’s also amazing to me that it’s never come out throughout the years. It’s not my place to judge, but there’s a lot of kids who have been sexually exploited and may be experiencing adverse effects in their lives.” Harris, though, denied that he had been adversely affected by the experience. 

I interviewed Harris for about forty-five minutes. He said that I was the first person he ever talked to about his participation with Larry King. Harris provided me with a lot of details, and he expressed a heartfelt sincerity. Moreover, I hadn’t paid him for the interview, and he didn’t have any financial motive to be untruthful. After the interview, Harris went upstairs and retrieved Hill, and the three of us drove to a sports bar. I didn’t have a drink, but Hill and Harris imbibed a number. Though I felt both were being honest with me, I have a tendency to believe that in vino veritas can be a useful tool for excavating the truth in some situations. As Hill and Harris became slightly intoxicated, they never diverged from their original statements to me, and I subtly doubled back on them quite a bit. They also repeatedly spoke of sexual conquests with women to the point of overkill, and I felt that their respective abuses had left both deeply scarred. 

After dinner and drinks, we drove back to Harris’ place. The three of us exchanged hugs on the street—Harris walked to his house as Hill and I headed back to Omaha. I continued to keep in touch with Hill, but Harris moved and I lost touch with him. I made repeated trips to Nebraska over the years, and in February of 2007 I took a jaunt to Kansas City to see Harris. Hill didn’t accompany me, because he had been busted for selling crack—street level dealing—and was riding out his second stretch in prison. 

I found Harris living in a rickety apartment building in the worst of Kansas City neighborhoods. Several of the buildings surrounding his apartment were gutted or boarded up, and the neighborhood had a Berlin-circa-1945 feel to it. His apartment was practically devoid of furniture, and the pictures of his children where nowhere to be found. Harris seemed as desolate as the abandoned buildings near his apartment—his body had become withered, his face sunken, and his skin was sallow. He looked like he had aged ten years since I first met him. It was obvious to me that he had fallen prey to either crack or crystal meth—his girlfriend was still supporting him. As I drove away from Kansas City that day, I concluded that though Harris had put up a good front three years earlier, his sexual exploitation had wreaked indelible damage that would require extensive help if he were ever to recover. 

I gleaned the name of another former Boys Town student, Nikolai Cayman, from John DeCamp—Cayman said that he had been a victim of King’s while a Boys Town student. However, the story DeCamp conveyed to me was so strange—even by the standards of the Franklin narrative—I initially had major difficulties taking it too seriously, and I put it on the back burner. 

DeCamp recalled being contacted by Nevada law enforcement who were delving into the background of one Frederick Paine, a former Boys Town student, and Cayman’s reported brother. Paine had shot a Las Vegas cabdriver in the head and was sitting on Nevada’s death row. The law enforcement officials had apparently read The Franklin Cover-Up, or someone affiliated with them had read the book, and they told DeCamp they were looking for answers about Paine and Boys Town. 

The law enforcement officials also said that Paine had a brother named Andre Paine, whom the feds had apprehended for possession of child pornography. DeCamp eventually managed to talk to Andre, and Andre related a peculiar tale indeed. Andre maintained that he arrived at Boys Town in the mid-1980s, and, shortly thereafter, he had started flying with Larry King. He also told DeCamp that Boys Town personnel, without rhyme or reason, suddenly placed him on an early morning flight to Georgia, where he was abruptly deposited in a psychiatric facility. Andre said his abrupt relocation occurred in late 1988; so I believe DeCamp surmised that if Andre’s story was true, his quick exodus from Boys Town would have been brought about by the credit union’s collapse and the subsequent attention focused on Larry King. And to cap off a very strange story, Andre Paine had changed his name to Nikolai Cayman. 

After DeCamp relayed the story to me, I nodded and smiled. It was just too strange, and I didn’t have a clue about where to start in search of corroboration. Moreover, Paine/Cayman wasn’t on Caradori’s Leads List; I didn’t have the slightest paper trail connecting him to Boys Town. 

But one day I found myself with a little time on my hands, and I wrote a letter to “Nikolai Cayman”—he was in a federal prison in Butner, North Carolina. In the letter, I wrote that I had garnered his name from John DeCamp and asked him about his Boys Town experiences. A month or so elapsed before I received a short letter from him. His handwriting was truly unique—almost like a medieval calligraphy. He didn’t seem very happy about receiving my letter: “Since I met Mr. DeCamp, my name has been tossed carelessly to anyone who inquires about past abuse or situations concerning Boys Town and the like without my permission. I am not pleased…. Why on earth would you want to talk to me about my experiences at Boys Town? There are thousands of people who lived at Boys Town as a child. Why not them?” 

In my second letter to him I was much more specific: I told him about the story I was working on, and I asked him whether or not he had been affiliated with Larry King. His second letter, considerably longer, with the same calligraphy-like handwriting, followed. He started out with “Dear Nick” instead of “Mr. Bryant,” and I felt like my second letter had made a little progress. He thanked me for my candor, even though he didn’t give me an answer about his involvement with Larry King; rather, he plied me with a number of questions and also remarked on an issue that is particularly germane: “When you write your story my name would be mentioned (which I don’t mind) and anybody who would like to challenge what I say would be quick to point out my criminal history. Unless the rules changed, felons are not to be trusted—ever.” 

Most convicts I’ve talked to over the years, especially if they’ve experienced horrific childhoods, have had a tendency to blame their incarcerations on a variety of factors other than themselves—their upbringing, snitches, lawyers, prosecutors, judges, etc. But Cayman took full, unflinching responsibility for his current circumstances: “I’ve created a lot of problems in my adult life, and I cannot blame anybody but myself. When I was getting sentenced my lawyer wanted to bring up my childhood and the many factors that made it so impossible. He had access to documents that reported abuse by a lot of people…. His reason was that he felt that the judge would have mercy on me and give me a lesser sentence. However, I objected to this…. My firm belief is that, though you are not responsible for how you are raised and how you turned out, you are responsible for your actions. The law is the law….” 

I wrote a third letter to Cayman and also sent him The Road Less Traveled. His second letter had been introspective, and I felt that the book might be beneficial to him. His third letter thanked me for The Road Less Traveled, and he wrote he was “enjoying” it. Cayman initially discussed Boys Town: “Boys Town, as a whole to me, was a successful failure. I learned a lot about social skills and how to treat people. Yet, I did so at the price of losing my soul…. Still, as I stated before, I have had good times, bad times, and scary times at Boys Town. Through it all, it was the best I was going to get at the time.” 

His letter then shifted to Larry King: “You asked me about my interactions with him [King]. What can I say? Whatever I tell you I believe you already know. I can supply an answer, but before I do I ask this question of you: What do you know or have heard about him? I don’t mean to frustrate you, but I don’t want to tell you something you already heard or know. My interaction with Larry King was through child prostitution. 

I suppose you want some detail, but refer to my question before you ask. Please.” 

After Cayman and I had a few correspondences, I opted to take my first incremental steps to corroborate his story. I knew where to find his purported brother— Nevada’s death row—so I wrote him a letter, inquiring if he had a brother who had changed his name to Nikolai Cayman. I received a letter from him about a month later—he wrote that his brother had, in fact, changed his name to Nikolai Cayman and had also attended Boys Town. The information of a death row inmate is dubious at best, but he had absolutely no reason to lie—I decided to continue exploring Cayman’s story. 

In the interim, I had written a letter to Cayman, explaining the exact allegations that I was investigating. Though I wanted additional details about King, I requested that he provide me with a short biography—he acquiesced: “Coming to Boys Town was perhaps the best thing that could have happened to me. The year was 1985, and I had just turned eleven years old. At that time life wasn’t so good. My father kicked me out of his house after only living with him two years of my entire life. I went through many foster homes but eventually ended up at a mental hospital. I wasn’t crazy. I was depressed. Nobody wanted me because I was too old. Most people wanted a child eight years or younger. My caseworker put me in the hospital for storage until Boys Town would accept me. After five months I arrived there. My brothers were at Boys Town, and things seemed to be getting better. I did not live with them, but they were not far away. 

“Boys Town was more than I expected. Father Peter became the new director, and MGM was making a movie called Miracle of the Heart. My Family-Teachers were OK, and my first month was OK. Yet serious problems began to arise. I was the youngest student in our house, and I was not well liked because of it. I was hit, kicked, slapped, and almost raped by some of the older boys. My Family-Teachers did their best to protect me by giving me a room by myself and kept me near them when we ate or went on family outings. Though my brothers were near, I hardly visited them. I became miserable and ran away to my mother’s apartment often. I would stay for a day and then return back to Boys Town, who eventually barred me from seeing her…. 

“My school grades were average, but my behavior was different. I had this, ‘I don’t give a damn,’ attitude and usually did what I wanted within reason. I might curse a student out but certainly not the teacher. No. The most I would do is test their limits —pushing the envelope. This attracted my peer group, and thus popularity followed from within the school. At home, however, things weren’t getting any better. Eventually I was moved to another home…. 

“At one point they were considered to be one of the best houses on campus. But, like most Family-Teachers, they seemed to be frustrated with the system Boys Town wanted them to follow. Soon their attitude went sour, and they began to play mind games. One moment they liked you and the next they didn’t—for no reason. At one point, for example, they told me that they received permission for me to visit my mom, whom I haven’t seen or heard from in a long time. I received weekend passes to see her, but I didn’t. There was another agenda at hand, and in truth they never knew her address or phone number. But I would get these passes to leave campus under the assumption that I would visit my mother. Then one day out of the blue, they denied ever getting permission for me to visit her….

“Then one day early in the morning I was put on a plane to Georgia with no explanation other than saying I was terminated. Previously … I was given a pass to see my mother (which I didn’t) and when I returned, Boys Town said that I ran away.… When I arrived in Georgia, I was a mess. I hardly knew my name, date, month, and even my location. That was all that was needed for a commitment to the mental ward. For two and a half years I was in a mental hospital. I was in the hospital so long that nobody knew why any more. Eventually I returned back to Boys Town.” 

In the letter chronicling his Boys Town experiences, Cayman didn’t mention Larry King. But I surmised that if he had flown with King, it would have been during the alleged bogus trips to visit his mother. He and I had a number of correspondences— he seemed sincere and provided sound details, so I encouraged him to phone me. After a workday of writing, I have great difficulties composing letters, and I also wanted a taped interview. He eventually phoned me, and we had the first of many phone conversations. 

I was somewhat struck by Nikolai’s voice—it was gentle and had the inflection of a naïve teenager. I thought he would have the sharp edges of a con who’d been through myriad institutions, and I was reminded of the way Alisha Owen had sounded when Gary Caradori initially interviewed her: She too had experienced horrific events, but came across on the videotapes as being frozen in adolescence. 

Cayman, like Harris, said a fellow Boys Town student hooked him for King, but it was a different student: “I was introduced to King by another student who told me I could make a lot of money and meet a lot of different people—I could make something of myself. I was never told what I had to do to make the money, but that’s how everything got started.” 

He recalled being taken to the Twin Towers on his first King-related outing, and photographed in the nude—he described the photographer as white, thin, and having blondish hair. Though his description was vague, it loosely fit Rusty Nelson. After the Twin Towers “photo shoot,” he recounted subsequent outings to the Travel Lodge in Omaha for a pedophilic encounter and then to “some place out in the sticks” of Nebraska. He maintained that his first flight with King was a charter to Colorado. He couldn’t remember exactly how many flights he was on, but he estimated approximately twenty. 

“I was eleven years old when I started to fly with Larry King,” said Cayman. “There were always other Boys Town kids on the flights, and there were always drugs involved. As I got older, I attended the parties more infrequently. When I was eleven, I was the man. My Family-Teachers said that I had a pass to my mother’s. My mother is schizophrenic, and she didn’t do too well—she was living in poverty. They would take me to places that I knew my mother could not afford, and one of King’s people would pick me up. I never submitted the weekend passes—I never knew who submitted the passes.” 

Unlike Harris, Cayman told me he received cash only once—$50 for the photoshoot at the Twin Towers—“King always said ‘I’ll get you later, but you can have anything you want at Boys Town.’” Cayman claimed that his Family-Teachers provided him with clothes and toys that weren’t afforded other Boys Town students. “As I’d get ready to go on a pass, my Family-Teachers would say … ‘let’s go get you some new clothes.’ If I said I wanted a keyboard, I would get a keyboard. Boys Town provided for clothes, but they wouldn’t provide for the stuff that I received— watches, necklaces, and nice, fine clothes. King said he had an arrangement with Boys Town—‘Whatever you need, all you got to do is say it and you’ll get it.’” 

Also, unlike Harris, Cayman divulged that he was subjected to extremely sadistic pedophiles—he related stories of pedophilic sadism similar to those conveyed by Alisha Owen, Troy Boner, Danny King, and Paul Bonacci. “A lot of the parties were outrageous—it was like one big orgy, but some of these parties weren’t always nice. You’d get tortured, handcuffed, beaten, and videotaped. To this day, I have scars all over my body from flying with King. Doctors have asked me where I got all these scars.” 

I didn’t broach the subject of Satanism, but Cayman, like Moore and Bonacci, said that some of the gatherings were satanic: “They would have these weird rituals, but I didn’t realize what they were. At first I thought whatever, but, as I got older, I started to realize that these were satanic rituals. There was cutting, blood drinking, chants, and dancing.” 

Cayman said that he could no longer keep the abuse to himself after a weekend of extremely sadistic treatment in 1988, and he told his Family-Teachers about his outings with Larry King. “I came back, and it wasn’t a good weekend. In fact, it was really bad. It was very sadistic, and I drank a lot of alcohol that weekend. I sat down with my Family-Teachers and attempted to tell them what was going on. I had never spoke about Larry King before. The next morning, early in the morning, they put me on a plane to Georgia and said I was terminated. The funny thing about it is that the caseworkers in Georgia were surprised too, because they said ‘Listen we just got this call two hours ago, saying you were on the plane and you were coming to Georgia.’ So they weren’t really given a full reason as to why I was terminated either.” 

In the biographical letter Cayman wrote, he mentioned that he was at the psychiatric hospital for “two and a half years” before returning to Boys Town—a very strange story indeed. Though Cayman sounded very sincere and provided certain nuances that lent credibility to his account, I initially had no idea of how to corroborate his story: I felt Boys Town would never give me his records. 

When I located a 1986 Boys Town yearbook, Cayman’s picture was nowhere to be found—I didn’t jump to conclusions one way or the other. Instead, I wrote a letter to his brother in Nevada, inquiring about the first year Cayman attended Boys Town. His brother wasn’t exactly sure—he recalled that it was around 1987. If his recollection had been around 1986, it would have been an acceptable margin of error. It wouldn’t have corroborated Cayman’s story by any means, but I understand that recollections can get fuzzy over the years. But, given the fact that his brother said 1987, and that Cayman wasn’t in the 1986 Boys Town yearbook, I couldn’t help doubting his story, even though he seemed sincere. 

I wrote him a letter about the discrepancies, and he phoned me. He stuck to his story—he arrived in 1985, he was sent to a Georgia psychiatric hospital in 1988, and then returned to Boys Town in 1990. He continued to stick to his story as I grilled him. I felt terrible about grilling him, because he had obviously been subjected to a brutal childhood and had suffered greatly—whether or not he had actually flown around with Larry King. He sent me a letter after I grilled him, and he continued to stick to his story: “I’ve asked nothing from you, and I did not contact you. I have told you what I remembered. I have not lied to you. There is no reason to. I understand the conflict and its implications on my character and my word.” 

As I more or less gave up on trying to corroborate Cayman’s story, I encountered affiliates of federal law enforcement who offered to help me out—I could not help noting the irony. Like most Franklin-related encounters, it took a while for trust to be established. But after they deemed me trustworthy, they gave me the dates of Cayman’s attendance at Boys Town: They said Cayman initially attended Boys Town in 1985, and that on March 30, 1988, he was abruptly flown to the Georgia Regional Hospital. He spent approximately twenty-two months at the Georgia Regional Hospital before returning to Boys Town. 

So ultimately everything Cayman told me about his dates corresponded to the federal sources. The only discrepancy is that he spent approximately twenty-two months at the Georgia hospital instead of two and a half years. In his state, as he looked back on his life, I thought it was certainly understandable that twenty-two months in a psychiatric hospital when he was fourteen or fifteen years old felt more like thirty months. Now I felt considerable remorse about grilling him, and I sent a letter apologizing. He phoned, and, though he seemed a bit miffed, he accepted my apology. He said that he wasn’t so much angry with me, but at the fact that he didn’t appear in the 1986 yearbook—it had been yet another example of his “invisibility” as a child. In response to my question of how he ended up back at Boys Town, he replied that he eventually wrote Boys Town a letter from the psychiatric hospital in Georgia requesting to return. 

Perplexed, I asked him why he wanted to return to Boys Town. He said that though Boys Town had been a succession of painful ordeals, it was still better than the mental hospital. In fact, it was probably the best place he’d been sent to as a child. 

Locating former Boys Town students on Caradori’s Leads List has been practically a mission impossible. They seem to be nomadic and marginalized—none have permanent addresses. After considerable effort, I did manage to find two more, but one refused to talk to me, and the second, Jeff Hubbell, denied any affiliation with King. 

Another former Boys Town student on the Leads List was Rue Fox. Though I knew how Caradori came up with Hill, Carter, and Harris, I had no idea how he garnered Fox’s name. In my database searches for Fox, he initially came up in Nebraska, but then he appeared in Texas. In 2006, he started to reappear in Nebraska, and I collected various addresses for him and started knocking on doors in Omaha. I never quite managed to get a track on his current address—his nomadic, marginalized ways made it difficult to catch up with him. Moreover, Omaha’s White Pages were loaded with that surname: Calling every Fox would have been far too time-consuming. 

I finally hired an Omaha-based private detective in April of 2007 to find Rue Fox. The detective gave me the address of Fox’s father, and told me that Fox was probably living with him. The private detective discharged a grave warning about Fox: He had a “rap sheet a mile long,” a “history of violence,” and had been incarcerated for armed robbery. I found Fox’s father’s house in a run-down neighborhood of South Omaha. He lived in a dilapidated two-story, yellow frame house. I knocked on the door without getting any response, so I left a note for Fox on the front door. I introduced myself, said I was a journalist, and left the number of my cell phone. 

Fox phoned me later in the afternoon and immediately asked if I were a cop. I replied that I was a journalist—I said that I wanted to ask him a few questions about Boys Town and Larry King; he became quite emotional after I mentioned Larry King’s name. He then repeatedly inquired if I were a cop, and I repeatedly responded that I was a journalist. 

He agreed to meet me at 7:00 P.M., and he chose a bar in South Omaha. He said if I were a cop, he would “snap” my neck. I arrived at the bar about ten minutes early —its front room was filthy, and there were perhaps ten patrons bellied up to the counter. The bartender was a portly middle-aged woman, wearing a loose-fitting dark red house dress and dark-framed glasses. Her shoulder-length, black-grayish hair and overall appearance were unkempt, and her face had the premature grooves of acute alcoholism—she seemed somewhat dumbfounded when I ordered just a cranberry juice. A few patrons also gave me strange glances. 

The patrons said little among themselves as they drank and watched television— they were there to drink, and to drink until they died, whether it was the next day or in ten years. I sat at a corner table that gave me a panorama of the front room and nursed my cranberry juice, which didn’t taste quite right. As I sipped the cranberry juice, I thought I should probably pop an antibiotic after leaving the bar.

I also braced myself for Rue Fox—he sounded dangerous and paranoid on the phone; I suspected drug addiction. Fox eventually arrived with two friends; a few of the patrons greeted him by his first name. He was a stocky, barrel-chested 5’10”, wearing a black T-shirt, blue jeans, and boots. He had obviously hit the weights pretty hard during his prison stretch for armed robbery or at some other point. His thick, brown hair had been cropped into a flattop; he had a square jaw and his face was scarred up—he looked like a pit bull that had taken on human form. 

I stood up and piped, “Rue,” extending my hand. He didn’t take my hand, but nodded his head in the direction of the back room, blurting, “Back here!” The four of us walked into the darkened back room in silence, and we took a seat at the table farthest from the bar’s entrance. We were the only patrons in the back room, and I quickly noted the location of the back door—just in case I needed to make a hasty departure. 

Shortly after we sat down, Fox again asked me if I were a cop. Once more, I said I was a journalist. He told me to stand up—after I stood up, he frisked me. When he was sufficiently satisfied that I wasn’t armed or wired, we sat down and he started firing questions at me about how I came by his name. I felt that only tangible evidence would abate his paranoia, so I pulled out Caradori’s Leads List from my backpack and showed him his name on the list. In addition to stating that Fox was a former Boys Town student, the Leads List also mentioned a foster home where he had resided. 

He snatched the Leads List from my hands and walked over to an adjacent pool table—he paged through it underneath the pool table lights. After he studied the Leads List for maybe five minutes, he walked back to the table and handed it to me, saying, “I believe you.” Fox’s acknowledgment certainly brought relief to me—his friends relaxed too, as if an electrical current nettling the three had suddenly been cut. 

I bought a pitcher of beer to further ease the tension. After Fox and his friends promptly pounded down the pitcher, Fox asked me for a lift to whereabouts unknown—I quickly consented. I wanted to get him away from his friends—I thought it best not to broach the subject of sexual abuse around them. 

After Fox and I left the bar, he wanted me to stop at a liquor store. He bought a pint of cheap vodka, and then he directed me to the proximity of a cop spot—as in copping drugs. He took long pulls off the vodka and repeatedly said, “You opened the wrong door. I had that door locked and bolted.” He eventually directed me to pull over and park. Holding up the pint of vodka, he said, “This is the only thing that keeps the door closed.” 

In the bar, I had noticed the tracks on his arm, and after we parked I asked him what he was shooting—“Crystal meth,” he replied. I then attempted to get him to talk about Larry King, but he kept saying, “You opened the wrong door.” At one point, his ferocious façade briefly crumbled, and he actually started to cry. I then delicately pressed him on the subject of Larry King—he became increasingly hostile and belligerent, and I decided to back off. Before Fox departed into the dusk, he gave me the name and number of either his “half-sister” or “stepsister.” He inexplicably told me I should call her. 

I found Fox extremely frightening, and I felt that I might need a little help with him. So I phoned the “sister” the following day, and I related our conversation of the previous night—she agreed to have lunch with me the next day. I picked her up at either a therapeutic community or a long-term treatment center—she too had been hooked on drugs prior to cleaning up. As we ate lunch, we talked about Fox. She said that she and Fox had been very close as kids—she thought that Fox giving her number to me was a plea for help. I asked her if she was cognizant of Fox being sexually abused at Boys Town—she said that she suspected it, but he never overtly discussed the circumstances. She told me that Fox had attempted to clean up before, but she felt he just couldn’t stay clean because of the unaddressed sexual abuse.

Following lunch, we drove over to Fox’s father’s house. Fox was in the driveway, and he was extremely hostile to me. “You opened the wrong door,” was his first remark. His sister scolded him for his rudeness—I was surprised by her tone. After we reached a détente of sorts, I realized that the time just wasn’t right, and I gave his sister a ride back to her facility. 

I felt both ethical and practical quandaries over Fox. My ethical quandary was rooted in the fact that his reaction to the name of Larry King had been so intense and dysphoric that I felt surely something must have gone down, but I was unsure if he was psychologically equipped to “open the door.” My practical quandary was that he was dangerous, and he might transfer that hostility to me and simply shoot me. At that point, I had been on my Franklin odyssey for over four years: I had thought that being taken out by men in black was always a possibility, but to be shot by an unhinged crystal meth addict was a little too anticlimactic for me. 

I pondered these considerations for a few days before I decided to give Fox one final shot. As I drove to his father’s house, I felt quite uneasy. I didn’t have his sister along to buffer his fierce hostility, and I thought the situation had the potential to quickly spiral out of control. I arrived around noon and found Fox and two of his buddies working on a mini-van in the driveway. As I tentatively approached the three, my mouth parched and my fight-or-flight urges began to kick in. But Fox, surprisingly, gave me a very warm greeting—he had hit up crystal meth an hour or two earlier, and swilled maybe a pint of vodka too, and he was comfortably anesthetized, even though he didn’t appear buzzed. Fox’s meth addiction and alcoholism had progressed to the point where the fix and vodka merely made him “normal.” 

Fox gestured to the garage, and I followed him. When he felt we were out of earshot of his buddies, he said he had been thinking about giving me an interview. I was shocked by his sudden metamorphosis and decided to stick around. Fox even invited me into the house and introduced me to his father, who had spent several years in prison. He was laid out on the couch watching television. With longish, straight gray hair and a gaunt, blanched face, he didn’t appear long for this world. As he watched television, he alternated between an oxygen mask and a cigarette. Fox had told him about me, and he didn’t seem too happy to make my acquaintance. 

Fox and his friends either had warrants out for their arrest or their driver’s licenses were suspended, and my mobility made me a welcome addition to the group. Throughout the afternoon, Fox and his buddies used me as a go-fer—I drove them to various places, including an auto parts store and a McDonalds. After four or five hours, and a handful of stops, I gave his two friends rides home, and then Fox and I talked about Boys Town and Larry King. 

Fox confided that he had consulted with his sister and father about giving me an interview—his sister said yea and his father said nay. He said his sister told him that he would never be able to overcome his drug addiction and alcoholism unless he started talking about his sexual abuse; I guess the father was taking his ex-con mentality of telling no secrets to his grave. Fox said that he usually listened to his father, but this time he felt that his sister was right. 

Fox was born in Galveston, and his mother died when he was just an infant. Fox’s father—with Fox and his older brother in tow—moved to Omaha in the late 1970s. After the move, his father was incarcerated, and Fox began his long odyssey from “foster home to foster home to foster home”—he ended up in Boys Town at the age of “twelve or thirteen.” By the time he made it to Boys Town, he had already been molested by one of his previous caregivers. 

Shortly after arriving at Boys Town, Fox maintains, he was shepherded into counseling for his prior sexual abuse. His counselor, Leslie Collins, had a master’s in social work and a Ph.D. in sociology from Yale, and his specialty was counseling sexually-abused kids. Throughout the 1980s and into the mid-1990s, Collins counseled numerous Boys Town residents who were the victims of sexual abuse. 

According to Fox, Dr. Collins introduced him to Larry King. It may sound unlikely that a sexual-abuse counselor would introduce a troubled adolescent who has already been sexually victimized to a notorious pedophile like King, but the counselor had a few secrets himself—he too was a pedophile. In 1996, Collins was charged with repeatedly molesting his two stepdaughters. Only after these allegations surfaced would Boys Town terminate its long-standing association with Collins. Nikolai Cayman asserts that Dr. Collins was also his counselor. 

After the introduction to King, Fox told me, he initially liked the man: “I thought King was a cool dude.” King took him to various places around Omaha, including Crossroads, a popular Omaha mall, and also to movie theaters. But Fox’s honeymoon with Larry King was short-lived. “One night he started touching me inappropriately,” stammered Fox, almost convulsing as he fought back tears. “He started rubbing my legs, saying that it was all right, that he wasn’t doing anything bad. He asked me to unbutton my pants, and then he started playing with my penis. He molested me ten or eleven times.” 

Fox claimed their pedophilic encounters were always one-on-one and often in a park. In this respect, Fox’s story is very different from the other alleged victims, because he said he never attended pedophilic orgies at the Twin Towers and was never flown around in chartered planes. Fox became quite frenetic when he discussed King’s increasing aggression and viciousness: King started practicing anal intercourse, resulting in a laceration. “I had thirteen stitches put in me. My house parents took me to get the stitches, but they didn’t know how it happened—it was my little secret. I was ashamed and scared—I didn’t know how to deal with it at that time. King told me if I said anything, he would just deny it—they would believe him over me.” 

Fox told me he refused to have additional encounters with King, but the emotional turmoil of being tossed among various foster homes and repeatedly molested had taken a severe toll on him, and he started acting out at Boys Town. At first, Boys Town staff sent him to a “farm” for troubled students, and then they sent him to a psychiatric ward at Saint Joseph Hospital. 

“Larry King took a lot of trust out of me,” he said. “I put needles in my arm every day and drink every day just to hide from it. King took away my dignity; he hurt my self-esteem and pride. I’m thirty-six years old, and I have a lot of anger in me. I’ve been locked up in penitentiaries and mental institutions—all over this. I wasn’t a bad child. I didn’t ask for this to be done to me. If this didn’t happen to me at Boys Town, I could have had a football scholarship. I could have graduated. I could have done anything I wanted. Larry King killed my motivation—I just gave up.” 

Hill, Carter, Harris, and Cayman all alleged abuse while at Boys Town, but they still felt that Boys Town had redemptive qualities that helped them. Fox, however, looks back at Boys Town with absolutely no fond memories. “Boys Town ain’t nothing but a get-up. My world got crushed when my father was taken, and Boys Town crushed me even more.” 

As I interviewed Fox, he occasionally broke down in tears. The spite and rancor he wore like a protective suit of body armor dissolved. The ex-con with a “history of violence” that I was warned about morphed into a damaged boy before my very eyes. Actually, the damaged boy had been there the whole time—I just hadn’t noticed him. 

I left Nebraska three days after interviewing Fox—I gave him a calling card before I departed, and he phoned occasionally. When his father died, he called me. He was seriously broken up about his father. He was also on the threshold of being homeless. I suggested a rehab program that was affiliated with the shelter where Hill had crashed, and he eventually took me up on my suggestion. 

We kept in touch as he started to clean up. I returned to Nebraska in November of 2007—I looked him up and took him to lunch. He had changed considerably since our first meeting: His anger had abated, and he seemed to be much more at peace with himself. I dropped him off at the facility and haven’t heard from him since. I truly hope he hasn’t reverted to his former ways. 

After I met Fox, I started looking into the background of Dr. Leslie Collins—the counselor at Boys Town who Fox said introduced him to Larry King. Collins was arraigned for molesting his two stepdaughters, starting at the ages of ten and thirteen. During the course of his trial, a depraved profile emerged: In addition to recurrently molesting his stepdaughters, sometimes on a daily basis, he also required that they videotape or photograph sexual encounters with their boyfriends. 

He even held his elder stepdaughter at knifepoint for hours when she attempted to break off their “relationship.” Collins also threatened to kill her boyfriend if she ended her “relationship” with Collins—she took his threats very seriously: he had previously disclosed to her that he carried out covert activities for the CIA. 

Collins would ultimately be sentenced to thirty-to-fifty years for the sexual assaults on his stepdaughters. He appealed his hefty sentence, but the three appellate judges hearing his appeal wouldn’t budge: “Collins’ abuse of these girls is so bizarre that even those of us who think we have ‘seen it all’ are appalled,” the judges wrote in their decision. 

I found that Boys Town Press published two books that were coauthored by Collins: The first was written for the victims of sexual abuse, and the second was intended for therapists who worked with the victims. I managed to acquire Collins’ first book published by Boys Town Press, and it was dedicated to the “American People whose love and concern for neglected and homeless children and generosity and support of Father Flanagan’s Boys’ Home have since 1917 made our famous motto a reality in the lives of thousands of children—“He ain’t heavy, Father … he’s my brother.” 

I never managed to acquire Collin’s second book, but I did find a synopsis. The book’s introduction was written by Father Valentine Peter, Executive Director of Boys Town from 1985 until 2005. 

Gary Caradori noted that Peter was “very uncooperative” with his investigation, and Father Peter wasn’t receptive to talking to me either. I also found it very difficult to interview former employees of Boys Town. I’ve interviewed some who claimed they didn’t have a clue about the sexual abuse of Boys Town students, and I have a tendency to believe them. I’ve also talked to former Boys Town employees who seemed to have knowledge of various improprieties, but they declined to meet with me. I arranged to meet with a former Boys Town police chief, who didn’t show up. After he snubbed me, I phoned him—he never returned my calls. Moreover, the makers of Conspiracy of Silence found Boys Town administrators unwilling to talk to them regarding allegations that Larry King used the orphanage as a pedophilic reservoir. 

Eulice Washington told her foster mother, Julie Walters, investigator Lowe, and the FBI that Larry King exploited Boys Town students, and she stands by her previous statements. In the testimony of Owen, Boner, and Bonacci, videotaped by Caradori, they said Boys Town students were involved in King’s pedophile network. If they’re telling the truth, and if Carter, Harris, Cayman and Fox are being truthful, then Larry King plundered Boys Town throughout the 1980s. 

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A Carefully Crafted Hoax

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