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Goodfellas: The Hidden History of Resorts International

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Resorts International was a most curious creature that remains strikingly relevant today despite having been largely consumed by larger corporations years ago. During its heyday, from the late 1960s up until the late 1980s, it was at the absolute center of American power, serving as a kind of bridge between Underworld and Overworld figures. It forged close ties with at least two American presidents while accepting money and other forms of assistance from various drug traffickers, financial swindlers and Mafiosi. And there were of course the inevitable various "former" intelligence officers that always seem to factor into these shady private enterprises that dabble in intelligence.

While little remembered now, Resorts International was a trailblazer in the gambling industry, having first brought casinos to both the Bahamas and Atlantic City. But it also trailblazed other paths even more nefarious than gambling. For instance, it played a crucial role in establishing the whole financial "offshoring" culture that now prevails across the world. Even less remembered is its innovations in another industry: private security. Resorts would found one of the first world wide private security firms that would appear time again in a host of intrigues. But more on that latter.

Resorts International was largely a family affair that grew out of a company called the Mary Carter Paint Company.
"Mary Carter (she never existed) was pretty much a family affair controlled by Jim Crosby, two of his brothers, and his in-laws. Based in Tampa, Florida, the firm included in its directorate James Crosby, John Crosby (a plastic surgeon in Mobile, Alabama), William Crosby (a Tampa realtor), and the Murphy brothers, Henry and Tom, who'd married the Crosby daughters. Henry owned a funeral home in Trenton, New Jersey, while Tom was board chairman of Capital Cities Communications, a successful broadcasting business founded by explorer Lowell Thomas. The explorer too was an early shareholder in Mary Carter Paint, as was Republican Thomas Dewey."
(Spooks, Jim Hougan, pg. 381) 
Lowell Thomas was also a journalist and broadcaster who rose to initial stardom for his promotion of British Imperialist T.E. Lawrence, better known as Lawrence of Arabia. Thomas was apparently a neighbor of Dewey's in New York state, which may explain how both men became involved with Marty Carter.


Early Mary Carter sponsors: Lowell Thomas (top) and two-time Republican presidential nominee Thomas Dewey (bottom)
But why, ultimately, would such prominent figures become involved with an obscure paint company based in Tampa, Florida (and largely owned and run by a family hailing from New Jersey), in the first place? The answer may lay in another suspected early backer of the Mary Carter Paint Company. Acclaimed researchers Sally Denton and Roger Morris note: "... the Mary Carter Paint Company, which was widely considered to be a CIA front that laundered payments to the Cuban exile army in the early sixties..." (The Money and the Power, pg. 284).


Murky Beginnings

This is certainly quite plausible considering Mary Carter was then based out of Tampa, a hub for joint CIA-Syndicate efforts to assassinate Castro. As was noted before here, Tampa don Santo Trafficante, Jr. was one of the gangsters initially tapped by the CIA's notorious Office of Security to arrange for Castro's untimely demise. Trafficante, a close associate of Meyer Lansky (whom we shall return to again), had been deeply involved in Cuba's gambling operations prior to the revolution and would later become even more deeply immersed in the world heroin trade. As was noted before here, he was very close to the emerging Cuban Mafia, which provided ample recruits to the CIA during the early 1960s despite much suspicion that Trafficante was a double agent for Castro.

Santo Trafficante, Jr.
Certainly the Mary Carter Paint Company would have been well positioned to assist Trafficante in these endeavors in Tampa. And such a connection would also explain why the corporation, in the mid-1960s (as CIA Cuban operations were winding down), abruptly sold off its paint business and boldly delved into gambling. By the end of the decade it was managing one of the most profitable casinos in the world on the Bahama's Paradise Island.

What it amounts to is that by the late period James Crosby emerged as not only the CEO of Mary Carter/Resorts International, but as an extremely well connected figure within the GOP and beyond.
"... Crosby was himself uniquely situated in Republican circles: a sometime guest at the White House, he'd donated $100,000 to Nixon's 1968 campaign. He was also a friend of, and frequent host two, Bebe Rebozo (with whom he banked). Moreover, Crosby's private intelligence agency, Intertel, was even then working with White House aides and ITT executives to discredit Jack Anderson's revelations anent ITT and Chile. At the same time, Intertel was the de facto custodian of the demented billionaire Howard Hughes (his own $100,000 donation would later result in two volumes of Senate testimony in the Watergate affair). Indeed, the ties between Paradise Island and Richard Nixon's administration were of the sort that bind: Allan Butler, owner of the failing bank that was his namesake, claims the Nixon was a silent partner of Crosby's in his Bahamian ventures, sharing a healthy chunk of Paradise Island bridge revenues with yet another secret partner, Bebe Rebozo. And by by no means finally, James O. Golden, Resorts' vice-president and one of Intertel's founding spooks, had formerly served as Nixon's Secret Service shield, later taking charge of security for the Nixon forces at the GOP's 1968 convention in Miami Beach. That Paradise Island is a special place, and had a special place in the heart (or what passed for a heart) of the Nixon regime, is abundantly clear..."
(Spooks, Jim Hougan, pg. 180) 
James Crosby (right) and Richard Nixon (Left)
Clearly Crosby had established very close ties with the Nixon regime by this point, in addition to his infamous financial adviser Charles "Bebe" Rebozo. Rebozo was widely suspected of Mob ties for years, including links to the above-mentioned Santo Trafficante (noted before here).

Rebozo would hardly be the only with organized crime ties linked to Resorts, however. Not by a long shot.

Consider, for instance, Eddie Cellini, brother of famed Mafioso Dino. For a time Eddie operated as the casino manager for Resorts on Paradise Island. Reportedly both Eddie and Dino were close to Meyer Lansky, among other notorious Mafioso.
"... In pre-Castro Cuba, Nesline had been employed at the Havana Tropicana, where Lansky's man Dino Cellini was manager and where McWillie had also worked, before shifting jobs to work for Tourine at the Capri. When Ruby and McWillie went out to Cuba's Trescornia Prison in 1959, both Tourine and Cellini were there..."
(Deep Politics and the Death of JFK, Peter Dale Scott, pg. 240)
Dino Cellini
The Ruby the great Peter Dale Scott mentions above is none other than Jack Ruby, the infamous Dallas nightclub owner who murdered alleged JFK assassin Lee Harvey Oswald. Ruby has long been suspected of Syndicate ties and had worked the Cuba casino scene prior to the revolution. Afterwards he became deeply involved in the anti-Castro Cuban underground. An here's Eddie's brother Dino, a close Lansky associate, in the same Cuban prison for a time with Ruby.

Dino's ties to Washington D.C. Mafioso Joe Nesline is also of interest. As regular readers of this blog may remember, Nesline was the initial pimp of Heidi Rikan (noted before here), the D.C.-based madam they played such a crucial (and little remarked upon) role in the Watergate scandal.

Thus, Dino can be said to have lingered in the background of both the JFK assassination and Watergate, arguably the two most pivotal American deep state events of the twentieth century. Dino, with his close links to Meyer Lansky, was a major figure in the Underworld and the presence of his brother Eddie running the casino on Paradise Island indicates that Resorts International had strong Syndicate ties from the very beginning.

However Eddie did not last long in Paradise Island, having been kicked to the curb after 1972. With him appears to have gone a large chunk of Lansky's influence. These moves were likely political in nature and not geared towards cleaning up Paradise Island.
"... 'Lansky's established connections to the Democrats,' as scholar William Chambliss saw it, 'led Santo Trafficante, Jr. (and others such as Carlos Marcello of New Orleans) to forge political alliances with Republicans.' As a result, Lansky had been frozen out of the 'Teamsters-Republican coalition' and was 'engaged in major conflict with Bebe Rebozo and other Nixon associates for control of casinos and banks in Miami and the Bahamas.'
"As the furnace heat of a Las Vegas midsummer day still hung over the evening, Rebozo, the Florida entrepreneur and intimate friend of President Nixon, and Richard G. Danner, the Hughes empire's liaison with the Nixon White House, joined the Hughes and Resorts representatives for dinner and a Strip casino showroom. Before the floor show was over, the two factions 'reached a tentative agreement,' as Kohn recorded."
(The Money and the Power, Sally Denton & Roger Morris, pg. 285)
Meyer Lansky
This agreement, reached in 1970, would have profound implications for billionaire Howard Hughes and his empire, as we shall see. But for the time being I'd like to continue to focus on Resorts' organized crimes links.


The Vesco Blues

While Lansky's influence over Resorts (at least during the Nixon years) was marginalized,  there were any number of other crooks chomping at the bit for a piece of Paradise Island. One of the most notorious was rogue financier Robert Vesco. There was a time (circa 2001) that Robert Vesco was considered possibly the greatest fugitive financier ever. While he's certainly faced some stiff competition in the twenty-first century, Vesco's record is still impressive. Slate notes:
"The undisputed king of the fugitive financiers. Vesco fled to Costa Rica in 1973 in order to avoid standing trial for the alleged theft of $224 million from the Swiss-based mutual fund, Investors Overseas Services (see Bernie Cornfeld, above). Shortly before Vesco left, he delivered $200,000 in illegal campaign contributions to Richard Nixon's re-election campaign. The money was stuffed in a suitcase and handed over to campaign treasurer Maurice Stans, who ended up paying a $5,000 fine for "non-willful violation" of campaign-finance law. Vesco was indicted in absentia. He was indicted yet again in 1989 on drug smuggling charges. From Costa Rica, Vesco hopscotched to the Bahamas, Antigua (where he tried unsuccessfully to buy a nearby island called Barbuda and establish it as a sovereign state), Nicaragua and, finally, Cuba, where he has lived for the past two decades and, since 1995, been domiciled in a Cuban jail. Vesco was convicted in connection with an alleged scheme to defraud Cuba's pharmaceutical industry. Also arrested by the Cubans was Vesco's partner and houseguest, Donald Nixon, nephew to the former president. Nixon was allowed to return to the U.S., but Vesco went to the slammer. He gets out in 2009, when he'll be 74. Vesco's Cuban wife Lidia was convicted on lesser charges and gets out in 2005."
Ah, but this is only part of it. During his heyday in the 1970s Vesco was a crucial figure among right wing circles, serving (not unlike Resorts International) as a bridge between Overworld and Underworld figures. As to the former, there was clearly the Nixon family but Vesco was also very close to Reagan's first National Security Advisor, Richard Allen.
"... Richard Allen (who had been Nixon's first choice for the Plumbers unit) is known to have represented Robert Vesco in Washington back in 1972, the year in which Vesco flew from a meeting with Lansky's representative Dino Cellini to Costa Rica, and initiated the contact which later led to the proposed deal to manufacture Ingram M-10s in Costa Rica, between Vasco and Parabellum, Alliegro, and WerBell. Allen is also said to have been one of the U.S. contacts of the Aginter Plan Usine lobbyists who were proposing an economic freezone for the Azores (and the U.S. Mafia) much like that which Vasco, at Allen's suggestion, was proposing for Costa Rica."
(The Great Heroin Coup, "Foreward", Peter Dale Scott, pg. 21) 
Richard V. Allen
When Vesco wasn't busy assisting Allen in setting up offshore tax havens for their special friends, he was deeply immersed in drug and arms trafficking and sponsoring neo-fascist terrorism. In many of these endeavors he was aided by "former" OSS man Mitchell WerBelI III, one of the most notorious of the so-called "China Cowboys" (noted before here). For years WerBell was suspected running guns for the CIA when not aiding various far right wing causes.
"In 1974 WerBell – according to a motion filed by his own lawyer when WerBell, his son and his company Defense Services, Inc. were charged with illicit weapons sales – was involved in a 'conspiracy among the CIA, Robert Vesco, and various corporations to finance clandestine guerrilla activities in Latin America.' Vesco wanted to purchase WerBell's stock of 2000 silenced M10 machine pistols. When WerBell failed to secure an export license, he devised a plan to smuggle the weapons to Vesco. The two later negotiated the construction of a factory in Costa Rica which would be licensed to fabricate the pistols...
"Although the M10 and M11 could be acquired legally only with the special permission of U.S. officials, large numbers of silenced M10s turned up in the hands of European fascist terrorists in 1976-77. When Pierluigi Concutelli, a leader of the Italian terrorist group Ordine Nuovo, was arrested in Rome in February 1977, police found in his apartment the silenced M10 which he had used to murder the Rome magistrate Vittorio Occorsio. Occorsio have been shot down on the streets of Rome in July 1976 after announcing he would expose the close collaboration between fascist terrorist groups and the Mafia.
"However, it was among Spanish terrorists in particular that WerBell's machine pistols appeared in quantity. Most notably, a sizable consignment of M10s, sent to Spain under license from U.S. authorities, had been purchased by the Spanish intelligence agency DGS, which is allegedly coordinated the actions of fascist terrorists. 
"The fugitive IOS billionaire Vesco employed a large contingent of Cuban exiles in his Costa Rica sanctuary. Moreover, his weapons negotiations coincided with the efforts of the fanatic anti-Castro Cuban leader Orlando Bosch to assemble Cuban exile groups into an army of terror, CORU, that would later carry out assassinations and other dirty work for several Latin American regimes. During Bosch's 1974-75 drive, a wave of murder struck Miami's Cuban exile haven. Most victims have been opposed to Bosch. With the obstacles to his plan removed, CORU was established in June 1976.
"While Vesco and WerBell were hatching their weapons deal Bosch's base of operation just happen to be Vesco's Kingdom of Costa Rica – and Mafia heroin boss Santo Trafficante, Jr. was also reportedly there between January 1974 and the summer of 1975...
"In 1973 some of the details began to surface in a series of scandals linking these individuals. DEA undercover agent Frank Peroff charged Vesco with financing extensive heroin smuggling. For his initiative Peroff was fired summarily and his life was threatened. Before the Senate Investigations Subcommittee could probe deeply the case was squelched through the intervention of the White House. The Oval Office had already helped Vesco – a friend of the Nixon family – in his run-in with the Securities and Exchange Commission, which had sought his prosecution for the trail of swindle he had left in the world of international finance. Midway through the subcommittee investigation of the heroin charges, the DEA announced the disappearance of its Vesco file... 
"This was not the last heard of Robert Vesco in connection with drugs. In the summer of 1977 police uncovered the smuggling of large quantities of heroin and cocaine to Rhode Island. In one of the involved ships they discovered a ledger in which it was written: 'to Vesco/6 million/he picked up w. shrimper (Lansky)/"Curier" beat up.' "
(The Great Heroin Coup, Henrik Kruger, pgs. 182-184)
Mitchell WerBell III
That WarBell may have been supplying Italian fascists with his beloved M10 during this era is most interesting in light of another guest at Paradise Island during the early 1970s. As was noted before here, the infamous Archbishop Paul Marcinkus was reportedly a regular guest of Paradise Island during this time when he wasn't busy running the Bahamas-based Banco Ambrosiano Overseas.

As regular readers are no doubt aware, Marcinkus was the director of the Vatican bank that opened it up to extensive Syndicate influence, first via banker Michele Sindona and later Banco Ambrosiano chairman Roberto Calvi. In addition to the Syndicate, Sindona and Calvi also had close ties to Propaganda Due (P2), the infamous Italian Masonic lodge dominated by the Sovereign Military Order of Malta and Opus Dei. As was noted before here, P2 also had extensive ties to neo-fascist Italian terrorists such as Ordine Nuovo --in other words, the same neo-fascist terrorists that appear to have been well-armed with WerBell's M10s during the same time frame.


This certainly raises some interesting possibilities with Marcinkus' presence at Paradise Island at the same time Vesco, another frequent Resorts guests, and WerBell, were scheming. But unfortunately there has been little investigation into these potential ties. As such, let us return to the life and times of Dick Nixon's most notorious banker.

As was noted above, Vesco was again charged with drug trafficking while living in Cuba in 1989. He was arrested in Cuba in 1995 and ultimately died in prison there in 2009 (allegedly). At the time of his arrest the Cuban government accused him of being an "agent of foreign special services."

Needless to say, Mr. Vesco lived quite an interesting life. And when he wasn't busy financial schemes or political lobbying or arms and drug trafficking, he reportedly liked to kick back and relax at Paradise Island. He even lived there for a time 1978, when the noose was allegedly beginning to tighten.

Vesco was so taken in fact with Resorts' casino that he had considered buying it at one point around 1972.
"A friend of Crosby's, Vesco proposed to buy virtually all of Resorts property in the Bahamas, using funds from IOS. The purchase price was $60,000,000, split in two improbable parts. The casino toll bridge were to be sold to Gulf Stream (Bahamas), Ltd., run by Gil Straub, one of Vesco's cronies and a fellow indictee. Twenty million dollars in cash and five million dollars in promissory notes would be the price – a bargain of the first order. More than 300,000 tourists cross the bridge each year, paying two dollars apiece (or $600,000) for the privilege, and the casino reports an annual profit of about five million dollars. Even if one discounts allegations of revenue being skimmed from both the bridge and the casino, Gulf Stream could have earned back its entire purchase price in less than five years! And if the reports of skimming are true, the deal would have been even more lucrative. How much more is uncertain. According to Resorts figures, the average tourist leaves a mere fifteen dollars on the casino's tables, little more than a sawbuck in excess of what it costs to visit the casino. That seems an awfully modest sum when one considers the affluence of Bahamian tourists on a spree and the troops of high rollers who arrive every week on subsidized gambling junkets."
(Spooks, Jim Hougan, pgs. 228-229)
Robert Vesco
Even then Vesco's reputation was fast going down the toilet and the SEC quickly put the kibosh on any such buyout of Resorts. While the Nixon White House may still have been able to keep Vesco indicted on drug charges, it was unable to get the SEC to stand down. Resorts was unfazed. It had other curious backers ripe with dirty money at its beckon.


Mr. Billy

Easily the most bizarre was Richard Mellon Hitchcock, a member of the fabled Mellon dynasty (addressed before here). During the 1960s, Hitchcock (known to his friends as "Mr. Billy") popped up in a host of strange places.

I've already addressed Hitchcock at length before here, so I'm only going to provide a brief rundown of his notoriety in this present blog. He first made the scene in 1962 in the UK in the midst of Profumo affair that ultimately resulted in the downfall of Harold Macmillan's government in 1963. In '62 Hitchcock had had dinner with Dr. Stephen Ward, a key figure in the scandal, who reportedly made some rather provocative statements about the role he had played during the Cuban Missile Crisis he had played for the British and Soviet governments.

Hitchcock then reported these statements back to the US Ambassador to the Court of St. James, his uncle David Bruce. But in addition to marrying into the Mellon family, Bruce had also been a key figure in the OSS during World War II. As such, there has long been speculation that Hitchcock's timely meeting with Ward was intelligence-related.

David Bruce
Then, in 1963, Hitchcock would open up his estate at Millbrook to Timothy Leary and his entourage. While Leary and his crew occupied the main estate, Hitchcock lived out of the guest house and cynically partook in the acid-fried hi jinks. He evicted Leary by '67, but was not finished with the acid scene by a long shot. It was around this time that he became the de facto banker for the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, the so-called "hippie mafia" that was at one point the largest supplier of LSD in the world. It was in the capacity that Hitchcock became involved with Resorts.
"In the spring of 1968 Hitchcock and acid chemist Nick Sand journeyed to the Bahamas, where they stayed at the spacious mansion of Sam Clapp, chairman of the local Fiduciary Trust Company. Clapp was a college chum of Hitchcock's and they have been doing business together for years. They arranged for Sand to open an account under a false name at Clapp's bank. Hitchcock and Sand also looked into the feasibility of setting up an offshore LSD laboratory on one of Bahamas secluded cays – which led some to wonder whether Mr. Billy was 'on a Dr. No Trip.' ...
"Hitchcock took full advantage of his unlimited borrowing privileges at Fiduciary. At Clapp's urging he poured over $5,000,000 into unregistered 'letter stocks' (the kind that aren't traded publicly but tend to show dramatic gains on paper) associated with the Mary Carter Paint Company, later known as Resorts International. It was the single largest chunk of money raised by Resorts, an organization suspected of having ties to organized crime. Resorts International proceeded to build a casino on an exclusive piece of Bahamian real estate called Paradise Island..." 
(Acid Dreams, Martin A. Lee & Bruce Shlain, pgs. 244-245)
Even more curious is the fact that Mr. Billy's shares in Resorts ended up being managed by the infamous CIA bank known as the Castle Bank & Trust, a key sponsor of various efforts to topple the government of Cuba during this time frame.
"The bank was established by Paul Helliwell, a former OSS China hand with a background in drug-trade intelligence. After the war, Helliwell had run CIA front companies in Florida. Through his Bahamian bank, and a companion institution in Florida, millions of dollars were funneled for covert military operations staged off Andros Island in the Bahamas. Castle also facilitated tax evasion, and, in its trust-company capacity, voted the shares of certain nonresident owners of Resorts International, the top Lansky-era casino operation in Nassau. When one of their shareholder so strongly objected to the way Castle was voting his shares that he sued the bank, the scheme began to unravel.
"The shareholder was William Mellon Hitchcock, the New York stockbroker who had been using the Paravicini bank of Berne, Switzerland, to circumvent the New York Fed's margin requirements...
"After Hitchcock's lawsuit, the IRS made its move anticipating the biggest tax-evasion bust in American history. But the CIA successfully lobbied for the inquiry to be buried, and many IRS veterans quit in disgust. The Castle Bank shut down its Caymans and Bahamas operations in 1977, and moved to the more congenial environment of Panama..." 
(Hot Money, R.T. Naylor, pg. 315)
Mr. Billy on the right
Castle and Mr. Billy were ensnared in what was known as Operation Tradewinds, an IRS-sponsored investigation of offshoring that also turned up the Brotherhood of Eternal Love and Resorts. The Brotherhood went down while Mr. Billy got a slap on the wrist, but both Castle and Resorts emerged unscathed. According to Jim Hougan in Spooks, Resorts at least was saved by Richard Nixon, who intervened to stop the investigation.

What it amount to is that a big part of Resorts early funding came from LSD financier William Mellon Hitchcock, who brought the infamous CIA-sponsored Castle Bank into the fold. This should leave little doubt that Resorts was founded at least in part as some type of CIA front, at first geared towards Cuban operations, but later (during the Resorts era) as something more nefarious.

And that brings to possibly the most curious aspects of Resorts, namely its ownership of its own vast private intelligence network.


Rent-a-spook: Intertel

It was known as Intertel, short for International Intelligence, Inc. Intertel was incorporated in 1970 as an almost wholly-owned subsidiary of Resorts International and hit the ground running. During its heyday, Intertel had an impressive roster and an international reach. It would turn up in host of intrigues throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Curiously, it had its origins with Robert Kennedy's "Get Hoffa" squad.
"... Intertel, known especially and remarkably for its composition of former organized crime strike force attorneys from Robert Kennedy's Justice Department... The IRS considered Intertel... 'an organized crime enterprise of some type aimed at the Bahamas,' as one account summed up the agency's view. Roberts Peloquin and William Hundley, Kennedy's top crime fighters, had joined the firm and recruited operatives from the CIA, FBI, IRS, Secret Service, and other intelligence agencies. Staffed exclusively by what one author called 'Get Hoffa agents,' it was likened into a corporate CIA. 'With the murder of Robert Kennedy in 1968, the federal government's war on organized crime... was over,' wrote Hoffa biographer, Dan Moldea, '... and two its best warriors – Bill Hundley and Bob Peloquin – were dressed for war but had no one to fight.' "
(The Money and the Power, Sally Denton & Roger Morris, pg. 284)
Robert Kennedy
In point of fact, the enigmatic Robert Peloquin always seemed to have some war or other to fight. Peloquin first got into the intelligence racket in during the Korean conflict when he joined the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI). He was on active duty with the ONI from 1951 to 1955, and continued Office to serve in the reserves for over twenty-five years, finally retiring in 1981 with the rank of Commander. Interestingly, the ONI was one of the two US intelligence agencies (the other being the OSS) that initiated Operation Underworld, effectively a collaboration between the Syndicate and US intelligence during World War II. Meyer Lansky played a key role in establishing this arrangement, which many believe continues to this day. But back to Peloquin.

In 1956 he graduated from Georgetown University Law School (Georgetown has a rich history of grooming future spooks) and was appointed Deputy Chief at the National Security Agency (NSA) in the same year.

Already possessing quite an extensive intelligence background, Peloquin joined the Justice Department in 1957 and soon found himself knee deep in the battle against organized crime, or so the story goes. Peloquin was involved with Operation Tradewinds during the 1960s before retiring from Justice, with some believing that he was running interference on it for the Syndicate. Shortly after he had left the government he ended up working for the NFL and especially closely with the Washington Redskins. As was noted before here, DC capo Joe Nesline and future Watergate madam Heidi Rikan were deeply (har har) involved with the Redskins in the same time frame as was Dino Cellini, brother of future Resorts manager Eddie Cellini.

Unsurprisingly, it was Peloquin's gig with the Redskins that led to the murky netherworld of Resorts International and Intertel.

And murky it was indeed. Probably the most notorious caper of Intertel was also one of their first: the abduction of billionaire Howard Hughes from Las Vegas. For years many have equated this to a kind of palace coup.
"Only a few months later, on Thanksgiving Eve 1970, Intertel agents descended on Las Vegas for the stated purpose of ridding the Hughes empire of the hoodlum elements that had infiltrated the organization under Maheu's rain. With the same mysteriousness and secrecy cloaking Hughes arrival exactly four years earlier, he was now 'placed on a stretcher, carried out of the Desert Inn to a waiting van and driven to Nellis Air Force Base,' as Barlett and Steele described the event. A wasting wraith on a gurney, he was removed from Las Vegas by James Golden, a former Nixon Secret Service agent turned Intertel vice president, and whisked by private jet to Resorts International's Britannica Beach Hotel in the Bahamas.
"As some Intertel agents carried Hughes down the back stairs of the Desert Inn, others 'rushed cashier's cages and began stuffing money' and IOU markers into satchels. Kicking down doors of Mahue offices, they occupied all the Hughes casinos. In yet another ironic twist, Robert Kennedy's legendary organized crime team had suddenly taken charge of six major Las Vegas casinos, while governor Laxalt and his gaming officials scrambled to figure out what was going on."
(The Money and the Power, Sally Denton & Roger Morris, pg. 285)
Howard Hughes
Howard Hughes's sudden departure from Las Vegas has been shrouded in mystery for years. Many of his close subordinates would never see the man alive again --indeed, there's much controversy as to whether anyone credible saw Hughes alive after November 1970. For the rest of his life Hughes only communicated to the rest of his empire via phone, if at all.

Hughes reportedly spent most of remaining years living at the Xanadu Beach Resort & Marina of the Bahamas. When he officially died on April 5, 1976, the body produced for Hughes barely weighed ninety pounds on a 6'4 frame. This, combined with the beard, long hair and nails, made the body unrecognizable. It had to be identified via fingerprints by the FBI.

the Xanadu
There has been much dispute as to whether Hughes had in fact died when he was reported to, or if the body was even actually his. It is beyond the scope of this present article to address these issues, but suffice to say, Resorts and Intertel were major winners from the shakeup in the Hughes empire and there has been much speculation that Intertel (and by default, Resorts) was in the driver's seat of good chunk's of Hughes empire. And this put a considerable amount of money at their disposal.

Intertel's other ventures include spying of muckraker Jack Anderson for ITT, investigating the Chicago Tylenol murders and the Bhopal disaster. Even more ominous, however, were its dealings with a shady Belgium-based private detective agency known as Agence de Recherche et d'Information (ARI). As was noted before here, ARI was linked to members of the neo-fascist terror organization known as the Westland New Post, a few of whom had also been implicated in drug trafficking and pedophile rings. Intertel reportedly hired ARI to do some work for them during the 1980s.

It probably goes without saying, but Intertel, along with the closely related Wackenhut, was a trailblazer in the private intelligence racket. Its legacy lives in the modern deep private that in many ways has surpassed the deep state itself. In its heyday, Intertel was a the absolute black heart of this network.


Meet Me Tonight in Atlantic City

At the end of the 1970s Resorts International set its sites on opening up another region to gambling, this one in the United States itself: Atlantic City. It was a rather ironic choice of locations to be sure, as in some accounts the Syndicate is alleged to have been founded in Atlantic City in 1929. And now it was poised to openly rule the city. Unsurprisingly,  Resorts was reportedly at the forefront of efforts to legalize gambling there.
"... Crosby's firm was the architect of the politically slick, million-dollar campaign which led New Jersey voters to change their minds on the subject. In 1974 a referendum to legalize state-operated gambling casinos had been roundly rebuffed by the local citizenry. Two years later, however, a new referendum, providing for privately owned casinos 'in Atlantic City only,' was in the works. And the man who brought it to the attention of Resorts, strangely enough, was David Probinsky (formally of the Bahamas and one of Pindling's disappointed supporters). Probinsky convinced Crosby that the new referendum would pass if Resorts got behind it. When Resorts did, acquiring huge (and moldering) Chalfonte-Haddon Hall Hotel on the Boardwalk, as well as the fifty-six acre tract that had been cleared for 'urban renewal.' Resorts told its stockholders that 'the tract would be developed under an urban renewal plan with hotel, housing and other facilities.' It didn't say what those other facilities would be, but it wasn't hard to guess."
(Spooks, Jim Hougan, pgs. 410-411)
Resorts Casino Hotel, Atlantic City's first gambling establishment
The opening of Atlantic City for legalized gambling proved to be a boon for both Resorts International and one of the future owners. He was a rising New York real estate baron who went by the name of Donald J. Trump.

Once Trump dipped his toes into the troubled waters of the gambling industry he would rapidly emerge as one of the premier tycoons of the 1980s. It is not a stretch to say that Atlantic City made Trump a household name --quite literally via his first casino, the Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino, which he built on behalf of Holiday Inn. Trump bough them out in 1984 and there was no looking back from there.


What is of great interest to us here is Trump's third Atlantic City casino: the Taj Mahal. While now widely associated with Trump, thanks in no small part to it leading to his first bankruptcy, it was not in fact Trump who started the casino. That dubious distinction lies with Resorts International.

The company had begun construction on the Taj Mahal in 1983, but had run into persistent difficulties in finishing construction in the following years. Then, in April 1986, James Crosby died suddenly. This left Resorts in turmoil (allegedly) and Trump stepped in. Trump bought a controlling stake in the company in 1987 and was promptly named its chairman of the board.

Let that sink in for a moment: Donald J. Trump, the current President of the United States, was briefly the chairman of a corporation long suspected of being a CIA front, that had decades-spanning involvement with the Syndicate, numerous "rogue" financiers, various drug and arms traffickers and which owned a vast private intelligence network that had managed to abduct one of the wealthiest men in the world and effectively take over his gambling concessions. 

And less anyone think Resorts had cleaned up by the time Trump took over, consider that uber deep state player Robert Peloquin resigned from Intertel and joined Resorts' board in 1985, shortly before Trump became involved. He stayed on with Resorts until 1990, by which time he had become the chairman after Merv Griffin had beaten Trump in a bidding war for Resorts.

the enigmatic Robert Peloquin
As part of the arrangement made with Griffin, Trump ended up with the Taj Mahal, which his first wife Ivana ran for a time. At this point in time a curious pattern began to develop with Trump's business empire: projects were financed with massive amounts of debt, they went bankrupt and yet the owner did not seem to incur serious financial loses from these failures. This is a pattern not unfamiliar to Syndicate-backed businesses. And naturally there appears to have been an extensive, Mob-linked money laundering operation being run out of the Taj Mahal after Trump owned it outright.

It would certainly appear that Trump learned a thing or two from Resorts during his brief affiliation with them. This should also shatter any notion that Trump is some type of outsider --Resorts was as deep state, or more accurately, deep private, as it gets. Trump would not have ended up as the chairman with Peloquin on the board were he not in the club.

And finally, this should leave little doubt as to how pathetic the mainstream media's crusade against Trump really is. Only the gods know how much money has been pissed away on phantom Russian-connections when a few hours of Internet sleuthing will turn up connections between Trump and one of the most notorious criminal organizations of the 1970s and 1980s, which Trump served as the chairman of.

And with that I shall wrap things up for now. Until next time dear readers, stay tuned.




Recluse on the Opperman Report

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Recently I appeared on the Opperman Report to discuss a host of topics. The interview was roughly centered around infamous cult leader Adolfo Constanzo, the Cuban-American drug trafficker and occultist who became a player in the Mexican drug scene during the late 1980s. It was a fitting topic as the interview was conducted on November 1, Constanzo's birthday and the Day of the Dead in many Catholic countries.

Also discussed were various Mexican right wing cults that grew out of the Los Cristero movement, including the Legion of Christ, the synarchists and Los Tecos. We also found the time to touch upon the West Memphis Three, Trump's organized crime ties, the Sovereign Military Order of MaltaJohn Podesta, and elite pedophile rings.

Enjoy and a big thanks again to Ed Opperman for having me on the show. The interview can be found here.


Related posts:
"Latin American High Weirdness: The Cults Part IV"
"Latin American High Weirdness: The Cults Part V"
"Latin American High Weirdness: 49 Headless Bodies Along a Highway"
"Secret Societies, Narcoterrorism, International Fascism and the World Anti-Communist League Part III"
"Le Cercle: Puppetmasters"
"Goodfellas: The Hidden History of Resorts International"
"Men in Black: The Hidden History of the Knights of Malta Part I"




Man's Son or the Children of the Sun?

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As no doubt many of you are aware, infamous American cult leader and goth/heavy metal icon Charles Manson shed his mortal coil on November 19, 2017. Manson's death came at a time when Charlie had been enjoying something of a pop culture Renaissance. The ill-fated David Duchovny series Aquarius most recently dealt with some of the more conspiratorial notions surrounding Manson while a reenactment of the Tate murders was crucial to the most reason season of AMC's American Horror Story: Cult. A few years ago it was announced that rocker-turned director Rob Zombie would team with American Psychoauthor Bret Easton Ellis for their own Manson TV series, but despite such pedigree, nothing seems to have come of it.

Most recently acclaimed hack director Quentin Tarantino was said to be developing his own Manson project, which hit a snag of late due to the ongoing fallout surround longtime Tarantino associate Harvey Weinstein. Even shock rocker Marilyn Manson, who took part of his stage name and persona from Charlie, has been back in the headlines of late in wake of as the Las Vegas shooting.

Marilyn Manson
I'm sure many regular readers of this blog are quite aware of many of the conspiracy theories surrounding Manson, especially in relation to the Process Church of the Final Judgment. I've dealt with this topic before here and here (and with the Process itself in this series) and will thus not delve into these topics at length here. What I would like to consider here in brief is Manson's ties to various far right networks and the truly global reach of these networks.


Fear and Loathing in Southern California

As many of you are no doubt aware, Manson is often depicted as the quintessential burned out hippie who ushered in the dark side of the Age of Aquarius, or something to that effect. But a closer examination reveals that when one looks past the sex, drugs and rock 'n roll, Manson and his cult had far more in common with later right wing organizations than with the 1960s counterculture.

To wit, Manson and his cult departed from San Francisco, the absolute heart of the 1960s counterculture (at the end of the  of Summer of Love no less) and relocated to Southern California. Manson explained this move as an effort to escape the "bad vibes" of San Francisco. But surely things would have been hardly any better for a hippie cult in Southern California at this time, especially around the Los Angeles area.

While pop culture often depicts California as awash in the counterculture statewide in the 1960s nowadays, this was far from the reality. In fact, Southern California (outside of Hollywood) was the absolute heartland of far right organizations during this era. The most well known was of course the John Birch Society (JBS), who had their largest national presence in Southern California at this time, but they were hardly alone.
"The geographical distribution of Birch strength corresponds roughly to the concentrations of petty conservatism around country. The midwestern Bible Belt is fertile soil, and the Mormon-settled state of Utah, Idaho, Washington container membership out of proportion to their population. The eastern seaboard and Chicago largely turned their backs on the society. The Texas, Florida, in Southern California are Birch country.
"Southern California is the lotus land not only for the society but for ultra conservatism in general. When the Australian Dr. Fred Schwarz first set up his theological anti-communism shop in the United States, it was in Waterloo, Iowa, but the siren call of the California southland soon lured him to San Pedro and now Long Beach, where his Christian Anti-Communism Crusade has been anchored since 1958. Possibly nowhere in the nation is there a denser concentration of rightist activity than in Greater Los Angeles. Two well-known outfits are the Liberty Amendment Committee (not to be confused with the Liberty Lobby), which from national headquarters at 6413 Franklin Boulevard pushes for repel of the graduated income tax, and the Free Enterprise Division of Coast and Southern Federal Savings and Loan Association, which supports a staff of paid propagandists struggling 'to preserve the climate of economic opinion favorable to Americanism.' The First National Directory of Rightist Groups, published in 1968 by the Alert Americans Association, lists literally dozens of smaller groups and fronts. Glendale alone boasts the United Patriotic People of the USA, and Community Crusades for Americanism, the Network of Patriotic Letter Writers, Pilots for the American Republic, and the Reverend W. Stuart McBirnie, who originates a daily radio program from his United Community Church and subscribes to the motto 'Free Enterprise under God.' This is in addition to active branches of the National States Rights Party, the American Nazi Party, Young Americans for Freedom, the Constitution Party, and Pro-America."
(Power on the Right, William Turner, pgs. 22-23)
the JBS in Southern California during the 1960s
Turner would go on to note that Southern California was also ground zero for the emerging American militia movement, with numerous right wing paramilitary organizations cropping up there throughout the 1960s. One of the most notorious was related to Christian Identity minister (and former Army intelligence officer) William Potter Gale, who was addressed at length before here.

Little remarked upon are the similarities between the Manson Family and later militia groups. Manson and his followers were allegedly preoccupied with a coming race war. In preparation for it, they began to stock pile firearms while searching for isolated compounds in the California desert to dwell in. There are shades of the Covenant, the Sword and the Arm of the Lord here and it is certainly possible that various right wing paramilitary groups in Southern California at the time took inspiration from the Family. But moving along.

After Manson's arrest, the Family would briefly forge close ties with the Aryan Brotherhood, the notorious white supremacist prison gang. Curiously this chapter of the Manson Family is little reported upon, even by alternative researchers, despite producing some of the cult's most shocking post-Tate/LaBianca moments. The alliance began in 1971 and quickly produced several striking moments of violence.
"In the summer of 1971, Manson formed an alliance with the Aryan Brotherhood (A.B.) at Folsom Prison by arranging visits between A.B. members and his girls, who – following Charlie's orders – gave the A.B.-ers hand jobs and lap dances in the Folsom Prison visiting room. Charlie swung a deal with the A.B. where they would protect him against prison beatings and homosexual assaults on the inside and, in return, Charlie's girls would look after A.B. members on the outside.
"The first A.B. member to join the Manson fold was Kenneth Como, who led a group of Manson Family members on a ten-minute shootout during an attempted robbery of the Western Surplus Store in Los Angeles on August 21, 1971. This incident later became known as 'The Hawthorne Shoot-Out.' Others involved in the robbery included Mary Brunner, Gypsy, Charles Lovett (aka. Chuckleberry), Little Larry and Dennis Rice...
"After the arrest of the Manson Family Six, it was learned that the same group had been responsible for the August 13th robbery of a Covina beer distributorship. The motive behind these robberies was to collect an arsenal of weapons to break Manson out of prison. According to Vincent Bugliosi, their madcap plan included using the stolen weapons to hijack a 747 and kill one passenger every hour until Manson – and all other incarcerated Family members – were released...
"Como in due time became a clan leader in his own right, as those Manson Family members who had followed him into armed battle now became his followers. Gypsy declared herself to Como, look, along with Mary Brunner, Charlie's first Manson Family convert. This resulted in a dispute between Manson and Como that soon came to a head, leading to the subsequent breakdown of the pact between the Aryan Brotherhood, and Charlie's Family." 
(The Shadow Over Santa Susana, Adam Gorightly, pgs. 144-145)
the aftermath of the Hawthorne Shoot-Out
The Aryan Brotherhood pact also resulted in one of the most mysterious pair of murders linked to the Manson Family. Nominally these killings appear to be related to the death of Ronald Hughes, an early defense attorney for the Family who disappeared in the midst of the trial. His body later turned up and Family member Sandra Good alleged that he had been murdered by the cult.

This all unfolded around late 1970. A little less than a year later the A.B. appears to have assisted the Family in tying up loose ends.
"Family members were still involved in murder and attempted murder. Brenda McCann, aka. Nancy Pitman, was arrested on November 11, 1972 in Stockton, California. Brenda had been Bruce Davis' girlfriend, with whom she had been on the lam in the Los Angeles sewers for months before they turn themselves in during December 1970. This time, she was found in a house which contained a body buried in the basement, that of Lauren Willett (19), who had been shot in the head. Along with McCann were two members of the Aryan Brotherhood, as well as another woman named Priscilla Cooper (21). Both women had X's carved into their foreheads, identifying them as Manson Family members. What alerted police to the house was the fact that a car parked outside belonged to a man who been murdered a few days earlier in Northern California. James T. Willett was a former Marine, and had been found in his Marine uniform: killed with a shotgun and decapitated. As the police were busy arresting the four people in the house – which contained a small arsenal of weapons – Lynette 'Squeaky' Fromme called and asked to be picked up, evidently in the slain Mr. Willett's car. The police were only too happy to oblige.
"The motive for the murders remains unknown to this day. It is known that the Willetts have been associates of the Family for some time, at least a year if not longer according to Bugliosi. Bugliosi also wondered if James and Lauren Willett were the same James and Lauren who had driven Ronald Hughes to his campsite; if so, their deaths would be in accord with the Family's tradition of murder-as-cover-up. Bugliosi was unable to find the original James and Lauren, who had long since moved from their last known address. Eventually, the two men of the Aryan Brotherhood confessed to the crimes and were sentenced, as were Nancy Pitman and Priscilla Cooper. There was nothing to hold Lynnette Fromme, so she was set free."
(Sinister Forces Book II, Peter Levenda, pg. 121)
The relationship between the Manson family and the A.B. later soured, allegedly on account of Charlie not being racist enough for the A.B.'s liking. Manson assaulted Como in prison while the A.B. reportedly retaliated by  slipping Charlie some rat poison. The eventual deflections proved to be costly for Manson as well. Not only was Mary Brunner Manson's first convert, so was also the mother of his son Valentine Michael.

A.B.-er Kenneth Como relaxing with a Manson Family member
Despite these setbacks, Manson would continue to forge alliances with Nazi-leaning organizations. One of the most notable and longest standing has been with James N. Mason of the Universal Order. Mason was a veteran of George Lincoln Rockwell's American Nazi Party (ANP) and after Rockwell's death, signed up with the militant National Socialist Liberation Front (NSLF), an organization founded by fellow American Nazi Party member Joseph Charles Tommasi in Southern California during the 1970s. After engaging in a dialogue with Manson, Mason launched the Universal Order during the early 1980s.
"... In 1980 James N. Mason (n. 1952), a violent Nazi who had joined Rockwell in the mid-sixties, revived the NASL (it had lapsed with Tommasi's assassination in 1975) as a forerunner of new militant American whites supremacist movements committed to an armed struggle against the so-called Zionist Occupied Government (ZOG), a current far-right epiphet for the U.S. government as a Jewish-controlled puppet regime. Mason relaunched Siege, in which he preached violence, racial strife and an all-out war against the hated system. In his quest for extremist mentors, Mason then became obsessed Charles Manson (b. 1934), the notorious killer serving life in prison for conspiracy in the murders of the actress Sharon Tate and others in 1969. Although Manson had carved a swastika into his forehead, his politics were vague. However, Mason regarded Manson as the supreme outlaw and adopted the convicted criminal as the spiritual leader of his neo-Nazi group, the Universal Order (the name came from Manson). Mason's Nazi religion embraced both Hitler and Manson as saviors, thereby combining Koehl's messianic piety with the millenarian violence of Tommasi. In the pages of Siege, Mason paid extravagant tribute to Hitler, Tommasi, Manson and Savitri Devi."
(Black Sun, Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, pg. 19) 
James N. Mason
In addition to Joseph Charles Tommasi, another former American Nazi Party member was gaining a following in Southern California during the Family's most active years. This would be James K Warner, who relocated to Los Angeles in 1966. There he became a high priest the Odinist Religion and Nordic Faith Movement. He later made contact with the Odinist Fellowship of Else Christensen. I've found no evidence of contact between Warner and Manson, but one can imagine them having some degree of shared interests. But lets us return to James N. Mason for a moment.

Else Christensen
Mason's ties to the American Nazi Party are especially interesting in light on the long reputed ties between Manson and the Process Church of the Final Judgment. As was noted before here, the Process (an organization which also had a morbid fascination with Nazism) had been in contact with George Lincoln Rockwell shortly before his assassination. And here is Manson helping a former ANP member establish his own neo-Nazi outfit while other members of the ANP were active in Southern California at peak Family years. In the case of the pot-smoking Tommasi, he actively tried to recruit among the counterculture. Unfortunately, few investigators have explored these links. But moving along.

Beyond Southern California

Now that the Process has been brought up, I simply must address Maury Terry's allegations on a nation-spanning cult network that Manson was a part of. Per Terry the cult, often referred to as the "Four P-movement," originated with the Process Church of the Final Judgment and had links not only to the Manson Family, but also the Son of Sam killing spree (which have long been suspected of being committed by more than one person), the Cotton Club murder, and the Atlanta child murders, among others.

As I noted before here, I find Terry's claims to be dubious on some levels. But his raw data is compelling even though I believe his sources (including the Son of Sam himself, David Berkowitz) led him to conclusions that are questionable. Most glaring is Terry's blindness to the extent of which this alleged cult dovetailed with assorted right wing groups despite the frequent references to Nazism in Terry's investigation.

Consider for instance a reputed member of the Son of Sam cult, "Big" Fred Cowan. A bodybuilder and "former" member of he US Army (like Berkowitz himself, any number of militia types and, increasingly, mass shooters in general), Cowan went on a rampage in 1977 in New Rochelle, New York at his workplace that left six people dead on Valentine's Day. By all accounts Cowan was an unabashed neo-Nazi.
"No piker when it came to racism, Cowan decorated his attic apartment with portraits of Adolf Hitler and Heinrich Himmler, Wermacht helmets, vintage German weapons, and a Nazi battle flag. He joined the fanatical, Georgia-based National States Rights Party and stocked up on anti-Semitic literature, but friends still thought he was joking when Cowan spoke about the possibility of 'shooting up a synagogue.' In Cowan's view of life, 'Nothing is lower than blacks and Jews except the police who protect them.' "
(Raising Hell, Michael Newton, pg. 113) 
"Big" Fred
Curiously, FBI informant and multiple murderer Frazier Glenn Miller was affiliated with the National States Rights Party (NSRP) in the 1970s. Miller, also an Army veteran, would go on to shoot up a synagogue in 2014. In fairness, Miller and Cowan were surely not the only white supremacists to contemplate shooting up a synagogue. It is interesting to note, however, that the NSRP had a strong presence in southern California at this time as well. In Power on the Right, former FBI agent William Turner notes that the NSRP was frequently used as a recruiting ground for the budding patriot militias there. It may well have been a recruiting pool for something else as well. But moving along.

the banner of the National States Rights Party
For Terry, one of the key connections between Manson and the Son of Sam killings was the figure of William Mentzer, a low rent hitman convicted in the Cotton Club murder. Mentzer reportedly knew Manson in LA back in the late 1960s and then did work for the Son of Sam cult nearly a decade later as part of a nation wide cult network.

While none of this has ever been proven, it is beyond question that Mentzer was involved in the murder of millionaire Roy Radin in LA. At the time Radin had been assisting famed Hollywood producer Robert Evans, who was already then legendary for his involvement in The Godfatherand Chinatown (which was directed by Sharon Tate's husband, Roman Polanski), procure funding for his latest picture, the Francis Ford Coppola-directed Cotton Club. Evans now has something of a cult following thanks to the documentary The Kid Stays in the Picture that glamorized his life and even had a cartoon based upon him at one point. Needless to say, this episode of his life is rarely addressed by "serious" movie buffs.

Reportedly Radin's murder was contracted by a drug trafficker known as Karen Jacobs, who had been using Evans' movie to launder drug money in addition to breaking into Hollywood. At the time of Radin's death Jacobs was married to Larry Greenberger, a member of the Medellin cartel and close associate of the infamous Carlos Lehder. As was noted before here, the Hitler-worshiping Lehder had extensive ties to the Fascist International.

Carlos Lehder
According to Steve Wick in Bad Company, Greenberger had also had dealings with fugitive financier Robert Vesco. As was noted before here, Vesco also had frequent dealings with the far right during the 1970s. But back to Mentzer for the time being.

Mentzer, whom Terry dubbed "Manson II," frequently collaborated with another killer known as Alex Marti. An Argentine national, Marti also reportedly had a soft spot for Nazism.
"... Marti, an Argentine and reputed for death squad member was more violent of the two, and also a Hitler to Cody who had a portrait of your in his home, a Third Reich library, and who admired the Nazi method of execution: a single gunshot to the back of the head."
(Sinister Forces Book III, Peter Levenda, pg. 218)
Marti assisted Mentzer in killing Radin and reportedly in other murders. Both men appear to have first encountered one another while working as bodyguards for famed pornographer Larry Flynt, the founder of Hustler. In this capacity both men worked for one William Rider, who at the time was Flynt's brother-in-law and the head of his security force. Rider, who was a crucial source for both Steve Wick and Maury Terry concerning Mentzer, was also a curious fellow. During the trials revolving around Mentzer, Rider was accused of poisoning "former" OSS officer, and renowned drug and arms trafficker Mitchell WerBell III, another Flynt security man and luminary of the Fascist International.

WerBell
As was noted before here, WerBell was also very close to the above-mentioned financier Robert Vesco. I also speculated there that he may have been supplying sub-machine guns to Italian to Italian neo-fascist terror organization during this time frame, a point that we shall return to again in a moment.

Rider was accused of poisoning WerBell by a private detective known as A. Michael Pascal. Reportedly Psacal, who had also employed Mentzer and Marti, had claimed to be a former CIA agent on more than one occasion. Eventually Pascal was linked to another murder Marti and Mentzer had carried out and reached a plea bargain as his health was failing. Pascal's claims do not appear to have been given much merit by either Terry or Wick, two of the only researchers to examine the Cotton Club murders in depth (surprisingly, there have been few attempts to chronicle this salacious tale despite the fame of Evans and director Francis Ford Coppola).

Certainly Pascal seems to have embellished more than a few things, but Rider seems to have deserved far more scrutiny that either Wick or Terry applied to him. Rider was apparently aware of Radin's murder for some time before reporting it to authorities and "involuntarily" showed Menzer and Marti the spot where Radin's body was ultimately found.

apparently William Rider (left) and William Mentzer (right)
And in another murder involving a prostitute, Rider apparently "lent" Mentzer the pistol that was used for the killing. He was then able to conveniently produce it for the police, linking Mentzer to a crime police had been struggling with for some time. This was also the murder Pascal was implicated in, by the way. But moving along.

Thus, we are left with Mentzer, reputedly a member of a nationwide cult network who is only a few degrees of separation removed from Carlos Lehder and potentially even Mitchell WerBell, key figures in the Fascist International at the time. What's more, Mentzer was frequently working with an Argentine national alleged to have been involved in the death squads there. During this era the Argentine death squads were closely linked to the World Anti-Communist League (addressed at length before here) and Operation Condor, two linchpins of the Fascist International.

Is it absurd to think that Terry's alleged cult network could have this type of international reach?

Not when one considers another alleged associate of Charles Manson. As was noted before here, there are strong indications that Manson knew infamous LSD trafficker Ronald Hadley Stark during his time in L.A., that Stark may even have been a source of the drugs the Manson Family was known to traffick in. Regular readers of this blog are no doubt familiar with Stark, whom I examined at length before here, as are many of you who have studied the murky history of LSD.

Ronald Hadley Stark
As such, many of you no doubt are aware that not only was Stark the largest LSD distributor in the West for almost a decade but also that he was almost surely an agent of some branch of the US intelligence community. Some of you may not be aware, however, to his ties to the Italian neo-fascist community, which were extensive.

What's more, many of these neo-fascists were involved in the murky netherworld of what is commonly referred to as Operation Gladio. For the unaware, here are a few details concerning Gladio:
"Operation Gladio was first made public in August 1990, when then-Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti admitted its existence to the Italian Parliamentary Committee on Terrorism. To this day much about Gladio remains mysterious. It seems that planning for the operation began to take shape in 1951... On paper, Gladio was a NATO-backed 'Stay Behind' operation: any Soviet attack on Italy would encounter a pre-established resistance network, a militarily-trained underground with access to secret arms caches hidden across the country...
"The Italian governments initially claimed the Gladio was part of the general agreement within NATO. NATO, however, officially denied any involvement. Revelations that Gladio-type organizations existed in non-NATO nations like Austria, Spain, and Switzerland further eroded the NATO cover story. Gladio really seems to of been what its name means: a double-edge sword to be used against both the Soviets and any elements inside Italy, from either the left or the right, that might try to take Italy out of NATO. Gladio also served as the backdrop for the 'strategy of tension,' which repeatedly destabilized Italian politics with bombings and other terrorist acts. Popular fear of terrorism, from either the 'left' or 'right,' could then be used to justify suspension of constitutional law or even, in a worst-case scenario, a military-backed Pinochet-like 'white coup' to ensure Italy's continued allegiance to the West."
(Dreamer of the Day, Kevin Coogan, pg. 332)
a patch used by Gladio recruits
As was noted before here, Gladio heavily recruited among "former" Nazis and vigorous neo-fascists. In many cases, the latter were used to infiltrate left wing organizations and push them towards acts of terrorism. What's more, there is compelling evidence that occultism was used among the lower levels to condition would-be terrorists. The ideology of the philosopher and occultist Julius Evola (whom Steven Bannon infamously addressed of late) was especially popular. Some of his acolytes among such ranks referred to themselves as the "Children of the Sun." Curiously, Terry claims that the East Coast branch of his alleged cult network called themselves "the Children."

As for Evola, his ideology appears to have been useful on more than philosophical levels.
"One of the principal influences on the ideology of Ordine Nuovo, and of the neo-fascist in general, was the philosopher Julius Evola. Evola rejected what he saw as the decadence of the modern world in favor of the nobility of 'tradition,' based on a blend of mythology, occultism and esotericism. It has been suggested that the remarkable control exercised by the leaders of the extreme right over some of their teenage followers could in part be explained by their dabbling in black magic and esotericism..."
(Puppetmasters, Philip Willan, pg. 43)
Evola

Not unlike the remarkable control Charlie displayed over his followers as well. And if the Pentagon and the US intelligence community were willing to sign off on these methods in Europe, would they not do so here as part of an American version of Gladio?

To be sure there is quite a considerable amount of evidence of these and cults like the Manson Family along with various neo-Nazi and militia groups were at the forefront of these operations. I have gathered much more evidence of this over the years that what is presented here. Those of you who follow the links and look at some of the older articles sited here will no doubt be able to fill in some of the gaps.

At some point I'll hopefully be able to return to this topic to fill in the remaining pieces. Until then, stay tuned dear reader.



Fringe: The Strange Dealings of Bob Bigelow

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With the recent bombshell revelations concerning a secret UFO program being run by the Pentagon, I thought the time was right for an update in an ongoing series I've been working on for over a year that I've dubbed "Fringe." It was originally focused on the connections between the far right and a host of arcane topics ranging from UFOs, psi, mind control, Tesla weapons, human potential, the occult and so on. The series thus far has generated over ten installments, plus two appendix, one dealing with the Unification Church of Sun Myung Moon and another (which can be found here and here) focused on the ties between these bizarre topics and a highly classified national security project typically referred to as Continuity of Government (COG).

As such, the reader is strongly advised to check out several of these posts for further background on the present matter at hand.

And with the introductions out of the way, let us get to the matter at hand. I'm sure many of you already have some awareness of the UFO program, but for those living under a rock, here's a rundown from The New York Times, one of the first publications to "break" the story:
"In the $600 billion annual Defense Department budgets, the $22 million spent on the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program was almost impossible to find.
"Which was how the Pentagon wanted it.
"For years, the program investigated reports of unidentified flying objects, according to Defense Department officials, interviews with program participants and records obtained by The New York Times. It was run by a military intelligence official, Luis Elizondo, on the fifth floor of the Pentagon’s C Ring, deep within the building’s maze.
"The Defense Department has never before acknowledged the existence of the program, which it says it shut down in 2012. But its backers say that, while the Pentagon ended funding for the effort at that time, the program remains in existence. For the past five years, they say, officials with the program have continued to investigate episodes brought to them by service members, while also carrying out their other Defense Department duties.
"The shadowy program — parts of it remain classified — began in 2007, and initially it was largely funded at the request of Harry Reid, the Nevada Democrat who was the Senate majority leader at the time and who has long had an interest in space phenomena. Most of the money went to an aerospace research company run by a billionaire entrepreneur and longtime friend of Mr. Reid’s, Robert Bigelow, who is currently working with NASA to produce expandable craft for humans to use in space." 
It is also interesting to note that this project was apparently largely overseen by the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA). The DIA is the Pentagon's largest intelligence service, though it is largely overshadowed by the CIA, FBI and NSA in the public consciousness. Conspiracy researchers are generally not very impressed by the DIA either. To this researcher's mind, this is a grave oversight as the DIA has been at the heart of strange dealings inside the US intelligence community for decades.


The High Weirdness of the DIA

The DIA first officially waded into such murky waters when it was tapped to take on the Pentagon's legendary remote viewing program, variously known by such handles as GRILL FLAME and later, under the DIA, STARGATE. The DIA officially expressed interest in ESP as far back in 1972, when they issued an alarmist account of Soviet efforts in said field.
"By the late 1960s the US intelligence community was becoming aware of all this, by way of popular books, official studies, Pentagon and CIA translations of foreign psi research papers, and agents and émigré reports. The first big result was a curiously titled Defense Intelligence Agency report, Controlled Offensive Behavior – USSR, which appeared in 1972. It noted that 'the major impetus behind the Soviet drive to harness the possible capabilities of telepathic communication, telekinetics, and bionics are said to come from the Soviet military and the KGB.'...
"Thanks to the Soviet 'head start' in psi research, argued the DIA report-writer, 'Soviet knowledge in this field is superior to that of the West.' In other words, the United States, which already had to worry about a possible missile gap – a Soviet numerical superiority in ICBMs – now faced the prospect of a devastating 'psi gap.' "
(Remote Viewers, Jim Schnabel, pgs. 94-95)

By decade's end,  the DIA was well on its way to closing the "psi gap," real or imagined. In 1979 it had taken on funding and coordination of the Pentagon's remote viewing program and took over complete control of it by the mid-1980s. The program would remain under DIA control until 1995, when it was shuttered.

For our purposes here, it is interesting to note that the DIA remote viewing program spawned an 1980s exploration of the UFO question known as the UFO Working Group that has curious links to the modern program. The UFO Working Group was first exposed in 1990 by another New York Times journalist, one Howard Blum, in his classic Out There. Blum was first clued into the existence of the UFO Working Group in the mid-1980s.
"The UFO Working Group was a spin-off of the remote viewing program and known more accurately as the 'coordinate remote viewing' CRV program. One version of the account told by Blum states the whole thing started in the fall of 1985 during a meeting held in the secure vault of President Reagan's Scientific Advisor, George Keyworth.
"Dr. Hal Puthoff, then running the SRI remote viewing program, explained that Ingo Swann, a remote viewer, would demonstrate 'A new perceptual channel through which individuals are able to perceive and describe remote data not presented to any known sense.'
"A short series of precise geographical coordinates were read to Swann, and he proceeded to describe a building. Once revealed the target turned out to be the country dacha of Mikhail Gorbachev.
"Following this, a demonstration took place to show how the displayed 'Scannate' technology was proficient in antisubmarine warfare. They showed Ingo Swan a series of pictures of submarines, some American, some Soviet, some in dry docks, some not built yet. His job was to provide the exact coordinates for each submarine.
"As he was set to call up the coordinates of the Soviet Delta-class submarine in one of the photographs, he stopped and reported that he saw something above submarine. Swann was asked to draw what he saw on a piece of paper, and he proceeded to render a sketch of classic flying saucer. 
"A report was made by the SRI team of the incident and sent to the DIA who was the 'primary client.' About this same time, money from the Army for the CRV program ended, and the entire program moved to the DIA. 
"The Swan submarine incident led to a DIA/Navy Intelligence sponsored program to use 'Scannate' to search for Soviet submarines. According to Blum's information, the DIA was able to detect at least 17 UFO objects connected to Soviet submarines over the next 14 months. The project was called Project Magnet, and the DIA Directorate for Management and Operations supervised it. 
"Moreover, the incidents of the 'hovering UFOs' around submarines provided inspiration to Col. John Alexander, then Director, advanced concepts U.S. Army Lab. Command, Adelphi, M.D. 
"Alexander was a Colonel in the US Army and had been interested in the UFO mystery since 1947 when he was young boy. He also had done work on 'esoteric projects, specifically in the intelligence community was psychokinesis.' 
"Alexander wrote a book on his UFO investigations called UFOs: Myths, Conspiracies, and Realities. In the book, Alexander pointed out that although UFOs are real, they are of no interest to the American government, and therefore there is no cover-up of the facts by American officials. 
"Alexander is also well-known in the UFO community for hosting a Top Secret – Special Access series of meetings in the mid-1980s to evaluate a possible new way of the government's approach to the UFO question. Alexander's group was known as the Advanced Theoretical Physics Group and bore the same 'Top Secret – Restricted Classification' found on the MJ-12 set of documents. 
"According to Blum, Alexander proposed that the DIA Project Aquarius viewers should view an area above Kickapoo, Texas. It was there that NORAD reported an unknown object had tripped a man-made electromagnetic fence extending up to 15,000 miles above the earth. 
"The three viewers were all asked to view anything unusual at that latitude and longitude in the last 48 hours. But in the day, on three CRV viewers had sent back drawing of a UFO. With this additional evidence in hand, Alexander convinced the DIA to set up a 'top-secret working group to investigate the possibility that extraterrestrials with making contact with this planet'... 
"Based on this psyche confirmation of a UFO been obtained by radar, the UFO Working Group formed in February 1985. Col. Alexander sent out the invitations for others he had chosen to generate a top-secret review of the UFO situation."
(Managing Magic, Grant Cameron, pgs. 107-109)

There's a lot to take in here and I will pick up the thread of this 1980s-era UFO group and its connection to the Pentagon's most recent one, but first a few points must be made.

First, the DIA appears to have been very active in the UFO field in general during the 1980s. Infamous Ufologist Bill Moore was in contact with a group of US intelligence officers that have sense been dubbed "the Aviary" on account of their use of bird names. The above-mentioned Colonel John Alexander was a part of this group and allegedly used the handle "Penguin." Moore's chief informant, who is still unknown, went by the codename "Falcon" and is widely suspected of being a DIA agent. As was noted before here and here, Moore threw the UFO community into a tailspin in the 1980s that it still hasn't fully recovered from and it would appear that the DIA was at the forefront of this disinformation campaign.

Another point that should be made are the allegations, first raised nationally by Jon Ronson in his classic The Men Who Stare At Goats, that the Pentagon's remote viewing program had been reactivated with the onset of the War on Terror. This is rather ominous in light of reports that the DIA, along with the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), have initiated Project ARTICHOKE-like "interrogation" methods, some including mind altering drugs. As was noted before here and here, the CIA/Pentagon remote viewing programs largely grew out of ARTICHOKE's 1950s forays into psi.

And with that out of the way, let us move along to the really juicy stuff.


The NIDS

Colonel John Alexander is a figure readers of my "Fringe" series should be well aware of by now. As was noted before here and here, he has been involved in the development of so-called "nonlethal" weapons for decades, more than a few of which may have been partly inspired by research conducted by ARTICHOKE, MK-ULTRA and like programs in prior decades. What's more, Alexander also appears to have been extensively involved in efforts by the Pentagon to create so-called "supersoldiers" (which, as was noted before here, was one of the original objectives of ARTICHOKE) during his time with Project Jedi. And despite becoming something of a New Age superstar in recent years, Alexander has decades-spanning ties to the most far right elements of the United States national security complex. In fact, Alexander appears to have first gained a foothold in this type of fringe research thanks to such elements.

Colonel John Alexander
But back to the matter at hand. After retiring from the Army, Alexander found himself playing a key role in one of the premier civilian groups dedicated to investigating unexplained phenomena. It was known as the National Institute for Discovery Science (NIDS). Alexander described the NIDS as such:
"... NIDS had been established by a local real estate developer, Robert Bigelow, to examine scientifically two specific anomalous areas. One was the continuation of consciousness beyond physical death, and the other was UFOs..."
(UFOs: Myths, Conspiracies and Realities, John Alexander, pg. 41)
Yes, the above-mentioned Robert Bigelow whose Bigelow Aerospace ran the most recent Pentagon forays into the UFO question. The NIDS, which Bigelow was the founder and president of, was established in 1995 and officially shuttered its doors in 2004. In addition to Alexander, it also featured the above-mentioned Hal Puthoff on its scientific advisory board.

Puthoff was of course a founder of the CIA-sponsored SRI remote viewing program (after having previously served in the Office of Naval Intelligence) that spurred the DIA's 1980s-era investigations into UFOs. Alexander and Puthoff were but two of numerous other-intelligence linked personnel who became involved with NIDS in its less than-a-decade of existence.

Hal Puthoff
Easily the most famous investigation launched by the NIDS involved the infamous "Skinwalker" ranch in Utah. By all accounts, Bigelow went all in on this mecca of high weirdness.
"... The organization called NIDS has been mentioned as was its mission to explore UFO sightings. Some readers also will be aware of the most unusual ranch in southeastern Utah that was acquired by Robert Bigelow. Sometimes known as Skinwalker Ranch, it has been a focal point for a wide range of phenomena for at least decades, possibly centuries... 
"It was the UFO reports that attracted Bob's attention to the property. However, what happened there did not fit into any neatly organized box...
"Orbs or balls of light were often reported by the Gormans, who worked the ranch. They were very troublesome and contributed to the decision to sell the ranch. In one memorable instance, three of the Gormans' dogs were observed snapping at the orbs as they floated through the eastern part of the ranch close to where they lived. These orbs seemed to tease the dogs and led them off into a nearby pasture. The dogs never returned to the house. When Gorman searched for dogs the following day, all he found were three grease spots on the ground, which he took to be the remains of the dogs. Fearing that his teenaged sons might provoke the orbs, he decided to vacate the premises, selling it to Bob."
(UFOs: Myths, Conspiracies and Realities, John Alexander, pgs. 232-233)
In addition to the UFOs and orbs, there were also frequent reports of cryptids (the infamous Skinwalkers, somewhat related to Bigfoot-like creatures), poltergeist activity and a host of other strange activity.

On the whole then it would seems that the NIDS had interests that went far beyond UFOs or even near death experiences (NDEs). The presence of famed Ufologist Jacques Vallee, who frequently drew comparisons between UFOs and supernatural encounters from earlier eras, has led many to believe that the NIDS developed a working hypothesis concerning UFOs that was stranger than mere spaceships from another planet.

Putting It All Together

Now, let's take a look at the timeline of these events:
  • the mid-1980s: Colonel Alexander allegedly forms the first DIA-linked UFO study group around 1985, thanks in no small part to interest raised in the subject by the CIA/Pentagon remote viewing program. During this same time the DIA also appears to have been running interference in the UFO community at large
  •  1988-1990: Alexander retired from the Army in 1988 and shortly thereafter his UFO Working Group was exposed by Howard Blum in Out There. This appears to have briefly brought the UFO Working Group to a halt
  • 1995: Project Stargate, the final name of the DIA's remote viewing program, is officially shuttered this year. At the same time Bigelow launches the NIDS with several key figures from the remote viewing program. 
  • 2001: 9/11 unfolds, unleashing the War on Terror. Rumors persist of a reactivation of the CIA/Pentagon remote viewing program while both outfits roll back out techniques they spent decades researching under the banner of programs such as ARTICHOKE and MK-ULTRA in the name of "enhanced" interrogation methods
  • 2004-2007: the NIDS is shuttered after allegedly inconclusive results. Despite this, the Pentagon taps Bigelow three years later to launch a highly secretive UFO program under the guise of his aerospace company. 

For years there were rumblings that the NIDS was simply a front for further CIA/Pentagon forays into high weirdness and recent revelations concerning Bigelow seem to confirm this. It would appear that the Pentagon's most recent investigation into UFOs had its origins with Alexander's 1980s-era UFO Working Group, which relocated into the deep private after the end of the Cold War. For years it was nurtured there by the generous contributions of Bigelow and the US intelligence community. This ensured that whatever discoveries made in these investigations would be well beyond the eyes of the public.

The question then becomes, why is this now being revealed to the public?

It would seem that this is partly the result of the ongoing civil war within the American power elite. The project was chiefly exposed by its former head, Luis Elizondo, who protested these program's secrecy to Secretary of Defense James "Mad Dog" Mattis shortly before going public. Since then Elizondo has attached himself to the disclosure project of Blink 182's Tom DeLonge.

DeLonge's project in turn appears to be little more than a continuation of a similar disclosure project effort launched by Laurence Rockefeller in the early 1990s. A key source to both efforts was none other than the infamous John Podesta, whose interests in UFOs became a lightening rod for controversy during the 2016 US presidential election (noted before here). These claims were of course latter overshadowed by Pizzagate, but there is no question the strange dealings of Podesta, a long time Clinton alley, had disastrous effects on Hillary's campaign.

John Podesta
By contrast, Robert Bigelow was an early backer of the Orange One and appears poised to receive ample government funding for his aerospace industry. Bigelow, who is based out of Las Vegas, may have had prior dealings with Trump of a less than legal nature, given the Orange One's roots in organized crime.

Robert Bigelow
On the whole, Las Vegas looms over all this like a specter. John Alexander is a key figure in the Las Vegas chapter of the Association of Former Intelligence Officers (AFIO), an organization believed to covertly manage the US intelligence community. Another key figure there is Alexander's friend, Colonel Michael Aquino, another figure with extensive ties to the far right (noted before here) who appears to have been running disinformation campaign in the UFO community for years as well.

And then there's the nearby Area 51, a long time staple of UFO lore that was largely leaked by the far right (noted before here). Curiously, Las Vegas shooter Stephen Paddock is believed to have been taking shots at a classified airline that supplied Area 51 shortly before beginning his killing spree. There is of course much speculation online at present that Paddock was a gun runner for some branch of the US intelligence community and with the covert revival of ARTICHOKE/MKULTRA, this raises some strange questions about the actual motive of Paddock's shooting spree.

It would seem then that Vegas is at the absolute black heart of much of the deep private's forays into high weirdness. But whether these recent revelations (and attacks) were simply payback for the 2016 election and outing of the Podesta brothers, or something far stranger and sinister is impossible to say at this point.

All that really can be said is that its been that kind of year.


Goodfellas: The Dark Tower and Beyond Part I

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A few months ago I published a piece that examined, in part, President Donald J. Trump's brief control over Resorts International. Resorts was a curious creature that served as kind of bridge-way between both the Overworld and the Underworld. In addition to Trump, it also had close ties to another controversial Republican President: Richard M. Nixon. Nixon's longtime benefactor, Howard Hughes, also played a role in the Resorts saga during the 1970s.

At the same times Nixon was basking in the luxuries Resorts' Bahama casino (while Hughes was potentially being held prisoner there), the gambling interest also employed the bother of a close Lansky associate and counted among its shareholders William Mellon Hitchcock, a Mellon family heir who at one point was the financier for the largest LSD ring in the world (noted before here).

And then there was Intertel, a wholly owned subsidiary of Resorts. Intertel was a private intelligence agency staffed heavily with former FBI men and other assorted US intelligence veterans. It is most famous (or notorious, depending upon one's point of view) for spiriting Howard Hughes out of his Las Vegas penthouse in 1971 and keeping the reclusive billionaire under lock and key for the rest of his official life, nominally under the guise of providing Hughes with "security." It probably goes without saying, but Intertel is widely believed to have been an arm of the US intelligence community.

Intertel was still a part of Resorts in 1986 when Trump procured a controlling interest in the corporation. He would act as the company's CEO until 1988, when ownership passed to Merv Griffin after Trump played a key role in completing construction on Resorts most ambitions casino, the Taj Mahal, which he ended up the owner as part of his deal with Griffin. In addition to the spooks, it would seem that the Mafioso were still part of Resorts at this time as well. Hell, even Griffin had his own ties to the Gambino family, according to New York Times journalist Wayne Barrett in Trump: The Deals and the Downfall.


This certainly put the Orange One in some interesting company. Curiously, not long after I finished this blog a report emerged that Steven Bannon, Trump's disgraced former chief strategist, had compiled a dossier while working for Ted Cruz in the Republican primaries that addressed Trump's ties to organized crime. Bannon eventually switched his allegiance to Trump, hence the report has never seen the light of day. Still, what little has been reported about it is quite tantalizing. CNN notes:
"A conservative watchdog group led by Bannon tried to discredit Trump in the early stages of the 2016 Republican presidential primary by shopping a document alleging that Trump had ties to mobsters, according to conservative sources and a copy of the document reviewed by CNN.
"The anti-Trump opposition research was the work of author Peter Schweizer for the Government Accountability Institute, which he cofounded with Bannon in 2012. It described years of alleged business connections between Trump companies and organized crime figures, allegations that have circulated among Trump detractors for years...
"The GAI is backed by the Mercer family, one of the largest benefactors for Trump's campaign. Rebekah Mercer, the daughter of hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer, is listed as the group's chairwoman on its website. But in 2015, when the document was produced, the Mercers were backing the campaign of one of Trump's rivals, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, and Bannon had not yet joined the Trump campaign.
"In early 2016, at the height of the Republican primary fight, Cruz cited possible mob ties as one reason for Trump to release his taxes. Cruz and his campaign cited published news accounts at the time as the basis for making the charge."
Steven Bannon
Among other things, the existence of this dossier is yet further proof of how inept the "Resistance" truly is, for Trump's ties to organized crime are in fact legion and researchers have spent decades investigating them. But even more curious is the fact that Trump's organized crime ties lead to an organization with even more deep links than Resorts International.


"Well they blew up the chicken man in Philly last night"

But before getting to that, it is worth noting the extent to which Trump's activities in Atlantic City were mob-related. This was already briefly touched upon with his ties to Resorts, but his very first Atlantic City casino makes these links even more blatant. For starters, Trump opted initially to lease, rather than buy, the land on which he built Trump Plaza Casino from some rather dubious sources. One of these was a company known as SSG Inc., which featured some rather curious figures, most notably Philly scrap metal dealer Kenny Shapiro. Shapiro, it turns out, was very close to the Scarfo crime family.
"... SSG, the real power was its managing agent, the cigar-chopping Shapiro, who would later be identified in law enforcement reports as 'the mob's main dealmaker' in Atlantic City in the eighties. It was Shapiro who controlled the secret interest in Cleveland Wrecking. His two-story office building just off the Boardwalk became a checkpoint for visiting racketeers who passed through town. Shapiro was busily funneling Philly mob money into dozens of Atlantic City real estate deals, and the broker on thirty of his transactions in and around Atlantic City was none other than the son of mob chieftain Nicky Scarfo."
(Trump: The Greatest Show on Earth, Wayne Barrett, pg. 207)
Kenny Shapiro
Shapiro was also reportedly the key conduit between Scarfo and disgraced Atlantic City major Michael J. Matthews, who was recalled and imprisoned over extortion charges. Matthews, at Shapiro's urging, played a key role in paving the way for Trump's gambling ventures in Atlantic City. One of Trump's earliest brushes with he FBI (which the Bureau now seems to have conveniently forgotten about) stemmed from his dealings with Shapiro and Matthews. During Matthews' trail, Shapiro reportedly dropped Trump's name during a closed session.
"Whatever Shapiro told the grand jury, it apparently involved the Trumps. Shortly after Shapiro's appearance, the FBI confronted Robert Trump in a restaurant in grilled him about Trump attempts to contribute to Matthews through New York subcontractors or Shapiro. The agents regarded his blanket denials as misleading. The agents returned for other sessions, including one at Trump Tower, with Robert, Donald, and John Barry, the former Assistant U.S. Attorney who married Maryanne Trump and became one of Donald's prime attorneys in New Jersey. Barry attributed Robert's initial evasiveness to surprise. The various discussions with Shapiro and Sullivan about contributions to the mayoral candidates were confirmed at these meetings, but specific comments attributed to the Trump brothers drew muted denials mixed with memory lapses. There was little question but that the Trumps had contemplated donations to Matthews and had even sought a legal opinion from Nick Ribis about going forward with them."
(Trump: The Greatest Show on Earth, Wayne Barrett, pg. 233)
Shapiro was hardly Trump's only tie to the Scarfo. There was also the son of Philip "the Chicken Man" Testa, whose death via nail bomb sparked the bloody Philadelphia Mafia War of the 1980s. In the midst of said war the Chicken Man's son made a very lucrative deal with the Orange One.
"Trump was simultaneously moving, fueled in part by Harrah's money, to acquire the nearer block for the Plaza's primary garage. One reason he did not even consider leasing the site was that a key corner parcel of it was owned by two men who, experience had taught him, could never meet a DGE standard – Salvy Testa and Frank Narducci, Jr., the sons of two Philadelphia mob bosses who had been murdered in the blood wars that had broken out in 1980. Narducci and Testa – who headed Nikki Scarfo's hit-man squad called the Young Executioners – had paid a scant $195,000 in the summer of 1977 for Le Bistro, a rundown, one-story, brick nightclub directly across Pacific Avenue from Donald's Plaza location. Predictably, they could never obtain a liquor license to run a club there; but they were only speculating anyway. Donald paid $1.1 million in late 1982 for the site, having the title transferred first from Testa and Narducci to Paddy McGahn's secretary and then to a Trump entity. The $220 per square foot that Trump paid for the Testa property was the second most expensive purchase he made on the block, even though it was one of the first parcels he bought. He paid twice as much for it as comparable parcels. While the routing of the purchase through McGahn's secretary may have been designed to put some distance between Donald and the acquisition, Trump would later boast in an affidavit in a court case with Harrah's that he had personally assembled the parcels for the garage, describing his involvement in the assemblage as the 'unique contribution' and 'critical skill' he brought to the joint venture with Harrah's."
(Trump: The Greatest Show on Earth, Wayne Barrett, pgs. 230-231)
Ruthless hitman and son of the Chicken Man Salvatore Testa
The construction of Trump Plaza was also littered with mob affiliates as well.
"The Shapiro, Testa, and Gerace mob cloud that hung over these Plaza issues extended to its construction phase as well. Three Plaza subcontractors had disturbing affiliations with the Scarfo crime family – including one, Robert T. Winzinger, who was eventually indicted and was said to have been visited by Scarfo himself on the Plaza site. The president of Trump's concrete contractor, Joseph Feriozzi, was accused by the State Commission of Investigation of evading questions under oath about why he awarded this unbounded work to two shadowy and inexperience firms."
(Trump: The Greatest Show on Earth, Wayne Barrett, pg. 232)
There were some other organized crime ties to the Plaza's construction that shall be addressed in just a moment. But before getting to that, let us consider one final figure who happened to own a portion of the land Trump ultimately built the Plaza on.
"Aside from five private home spotted around the block, the bulk of the site was owned by three major groups of speculators, tied together by a maze of complicated contracts and leases redrawn every time one more of the various owners tried without success to build a casino there. Longo had his hooks into two of the three groups, and the one he didn't represent was the sites most recent would-be developer, Plaza Hotel Management Group, which was led by two New York dealmakers with unusual credentials – Columbia and Yale law professor Robert Lifton and former national Democratic treasurer Howard Weingrow.
"Lifton and Weingrow had driven down to the resort town hunting properties in 1978, pulled into a parking lot that occupied part of the block, and asked who owned it. 'Howard Hughes,' replied the attendant. And he wasn't far from wrong. Roberts Maheu, the former top aide to legendary billionaire who once owned half of Vegas, had indeed formed an entity that had a goodly chunk of the site. He was just one of the site's mysterious emissaries from Nevada. Also involved was flashy Grady Sanders, who was said to be accompanied on excursions to Atlantic City by union heavies from the desert strip. Prodded by the parking attendant's tip, Weingrow went to a pay phone on the Boardwalk and called Maheu in Vegas, urging him to fly out to Atlantic City the next day. Eventually the Weingrow group struck a deal to build a casino with the Maheu and Sanders entities. But a federal judge issued a permanent injunction against the two Maheu companies after they allegedly made false and misleading statements in an attempt to push up the value of their stock. So Lifton, Weingrow, and another partner they brought into the venture took over control of the project, with the Maheu and Sanders groups assigned a secondary role."
(Trump: The Greatest Show on Earth, Wayne Barrett, pgs. 205-206)
Robert Maheu
Trump was then in effect leasing the property for Trump Plaza indirectly from one of the shadiest private detectives of all time. The name Robert Maheu should immediately set off red flags for regular readers of this blog and conspiracy buffs in general.

Maheu, a former FBI agent, had an especially close relationship with the mob for decades. In point of fact, Maheu is whom the CIA originally tapped to work as a middle man in their efforts to get the Mafia to assassinate Castro. This was hardly the beginning of Maheu's relationship with the CIA, however. As was noted before here, Maheu had longstanding ties to the CIA's notorious Office of Security (OS), the department that oversaw the infamous Project ARTICHOKE. It would appear that Maheu was used by the OS as far back as the early 1950s to run various "honey traps" (such as this) for the Agency prior to the PI taking over security for Howard Hughes. Curiously, it was Maheu's security forces Intertel bypassed in their rescue/abduction of Howard Hughes, as was noted before here.

Needless to say, by the time Maheu hooked up with Trump in Atlantic City he was no stranger to organized crime, spy games and eccentric billionaires. It is thus most interesting that he was there at the onset of Trump's Atlantic City empire. But moving along.


The Tower

Trump's close ties to organized crime predated his entry into Atlantic City, however. In point of fact, Trump's signature building --Manhattan's Trump Tower, which has long resided at the heart of his business empire --has been something of a mecca for organized crime for decades. As with his casinos in Atlantic City, the construction of Trump Tower was littered with mob associates. This is especially true of the concrete companies the Orange One contracted with. One individual in particular was believed to be quite prominent in one of the Five Families.  
"Using concrete, however, put Donald at the mercy of a legion of concrete racketeers, none more powerful than union boss John Cody. The balding, bulky, sixty-year-old Cody had weathered eight arrests, including one for attempted rape, and three convictions. Before Trump Tower was finished, he would be indicted in an eight count federal racketeering case, charged with taking $160,000 in kickbacks. His mob associations were so strong that the FBI claimed the Carlo Gambino, the most powerful mobster in America, came to his son's $51,000 wedding in Long Island in 1973. His bodyguard, indicted on a murder rap and bailed out by Cody's investment banker son, was later shot to death.
"Cody was president of the leading building trades union in New York, Teamsters Local 282. His members drove the barrel-shaped cement mixer trucks that would feed the Trump Tower job its daily requirement of concrete. The severe access problems of the site – located at one of the busiest intersections in the world and reachable only from the narrow 56th Street side – made the job utterly dependent on Cody's cooperation. Concrete can harden if it isn't used quickly, and Cody's trucks had to make their deliveries at precise intervals throughout the day. A slowdown – anything from delaying the pours to a full-pledge work stoppage – would have caused costly overruns or possibly even shut the job down.
"In the summer of 1980, FBI agents investigating Cody served Donald with a subpoena demanding that he appear for questioning at the Brooklyn office of the Organized Crime Strike Force. The Strike Force, which had been investigating Cody since he took over the union in 1970, had received information from a source close to Cody that the union leader had strong-armed Trump and won a commitment from him for an apartment in Trump Tower in exchange for labor peace during its construction. The investigators knew this was typical of Cody's modus operandi. His indictment would include a count alleging that he'd shaken down one developer for a rent-free, $1000- a-month apartment at Northshore Towers, a luxury Queens complex were a Cody mistress, Marilyn Taggart, lived comfortably. Scheduled to testify for the government at Cody's 1982 trial, Taggart disappeared shortly before it began. 
"Just as he had in the 1979 probe of the Penn Central acquisitions, Trump appeared at the interview without an attorney and willingly answered questions. He emphatically denied having promised Cody an apartment. Because all the investigators had was a loose allegation, apparently from real estate broker who'd paid kickbacks to Cody, and since the building was so far from completion that any deal could not have been consummated, the investigators were forced to abandon the Trump trail."
(Trump: The Greatest Show on Earth, Wayne Barrett, pgs. 185-186)
John Cody
Cody and Trump's other connections to the murky netherworld of the Philly-New York-New Jersey concrete racket is most significant and a point we shall return to in a moment, so do keep Cody in mind.

But before moving on, let us focus on the real significance of Trump Tower: namely, its use as a conduit of money laundering for various crime syndicates and individuals. It is likely in this capacity that Trump first forged ties with factions of the Russian Mafia. Consider one particular Trump Tower tenant:
"David Bogatin, a high-level member of a Russian émigré crime family, bought five tower apartments in 1984 for $6 million. Donald personally attended the Bogatin closing, meeting Bogatin and his lawyer. Working with Colombo capo Michael Franzese, Bogatin was part of a ring of oil entrepreneurs convicted in a record-setting gas tax evasion scam. After he pled guilty in 1987, agreeing to pay $5 million in back taxes, Bogatin fled to Vienna before he was sentenced and remains a fugitive today. The state seized Bogatin's tower apartments, and state prosecutors concluded that he purchased them 'to launder money, to shelter hide and assets' and use them on weekends and 'for parties.' "
(Trump: The Greatest Show on Earth, Wayne Barrett, pg. 194)
It would appear that Bogatin was in fact quite a high ranking member in the Russian Mafia. The New Republic noted:
"... A Senate investigation into organized crime later revealed that Bogatin was a leading figure in the Russian mob in New York. His family ties, in fact, led straight to the top: His brother ran a $150 million stock scam with none other than Semion Mogilevich, whom the FBI considers the 'boss of bosses' of the Russian mafia. At the time, Mogilevich—feared even by his fellow gangsters as 'the most powerful mobster in the world'—was expanding his multibillion-dollar international criminal syndicate into America."
alleged "boss of bosses" Semion Mogilevich
Bogatin was not the only associate of the notorious Semion Mogilevich to take up residence in Trump Tower either. The New Republic goes on to note that in the early 1990s another associate was a tenant there --one Vyachelsav Kirillovich Ivankov, an alleged enforcer for Mogilevich.

Ivankov reportedly arrived in the United States in 1992 and quickly set up an elaborate protection racket bolstered by Russian Special Forces veterans Ivankov personally recruited. During his time in New York, before his 1995 arrest, he was a frequent guest at Trump's Taj Mahal casino in Atlantic City (which, as was noted before here, was acquired from the notorious Resorts International) and kept a luxury condo at Trump Tower. He was ultimately deported in 2004 and assassinated in 2009 in Moscow.

As recently as 2013 it would appear the Russian mob was running rackets out of Trump Tower. The New Republic notes:
"In April 2013, a little more than two years before Trump rode the escalator to the ground floor of Trump Tower to kick off his presidential campaign, police burst into Unit 63A of the high-rise and rounded up 29 suspects in two gambling rings. The operation, which prosecutors called 'the world’s largest sports book,' was run out of condos in Trump Tower—including the entire fifty-first floor of the building. In addition, unit 63A—a condo directly below one owned by Trump—served as the headquarters for a 'sophisticated money-laundering scheme' that moved an estimated $100 million out of the former Soviet Union, through shell companies in Cyprus, and into investments in the United States. The entire operation, prosecutors say, was working under the protection of Alimzhan Tokhtakhounov, whom the FBI identified as a top Russian vor closely allied with Semion Mogilevich. In a single two-month stretch, according to the federal indictment, the money launderers paid Tokhtakhounov $10 million.
"Tokhtakhounov, who had been indicted a decade earlier for conspiring to fix the ice-skating competition at the 2002 Winter Olympics, was the only suspect to elude arrest. For the next seven months, the Russian crime boss fell off the radar of Interpol, which had issued a red alert. Then, in November 2013, he suddenly appeared live on international television—sitting in the audience at the Miss Universe pageant in Moscow. Tokhtakhounov was in the VIP section, just a few seats away from the pageant owner, Donald Trump." 
Trump Tower
In fairness, the Russians were not the first crime syndicate to run a gambling racket out of Trump Tower. It would appear that the American Mafia had beaten them to the punch several decades earlier.
".... Robert Hopkins, a Lucchese crime family associate who was arrested in his Trump Tower suite of apartments for ordering a mob murder of a gambling competitor. While the murder count was dismissed, Hopkins was convicted of running one of the city's biggest illegal gambling operations – taking in half a million week and running numbers out of as many as a hundred locations. State investigators maintained a tap on his Trump Tower phone for months, concluding that he 'controlled the enterprise' from the tower apartments."
(Trump: The Greatest Show on Earth, Wayne Barrett, pg. 195)
As with Bogatin, Trump personally attended Hopkins' closing. Reportedly a briefcase containing some $200,000 was also present but could not be accounted for in the aftermath.

The importance of Trump Tower in Trump's business empire can not be overstated. For many years it has been the headquarters of the Trump Organization while Trump and his family have kept residencies there since it was opened. When Trump kicked off his 2016 presidential campaign, it was announced at Trump Towers. After winning said election, Trump Tower was used as a base of operations for the incoming Trump White House. Trump accused then-President Obama of wiretapping his transition team there. Trump Tower is also where son-in-law Jared Kushner and Donald Trump Jr. reportedly met with Russian envoys.

Thus while the Tower's legacy is assured due to the political intrigues there, the seemingly decades-spanning money laundering operations there are probably far closer to its true legacy.


The Biff

The principal villain in the first two Back to the Future movies is a high school bully known as Biff Tannen. In the second film, a dystonian future is shown in which Biff has become a powerful gaming mogul who has turned his home town into a crime-ridden cesspool. Reportedly this version of Biff is based upon Trump and the Atlantic City of the 1980s. It is thus rather surreal that one of the most dubious rogues Trump allied himself with in the 1980s was nicknamed "Biff" by his associates in the 1980s.

Biff
Edward "Biff" Halloran was a close associate of the above-mentioned union boss John Cody and a reputed member of the Genovese crime family. He was convicted of racketeering in 1987 and spent four years in prison before obtaining his release 1991 after pleading guilty to lesser charges. In 1998, at the age of 57, he disappeared and has never been heard from since. Naturally, his family claimed it had nothing to do with his organized crime links and that his disappearance was most likely the result of some type of car accident he had one the way home from Florida. Of course, if organized crime was involved, his family likely had good reason to keep quiet:
"Biff Halloran had extensive oil and real estate holdings, including a racetrack in Atlantic City, New Jersey, and was looking for someone to run his industrial cleaning service. Individuals familiar with Halloran's operation said later that Halloran needed to hide his ownership in the company, called the Armstrong Corporation, because of conflicts of interest in the awarding of government contracts to construction firms owned by Halloran's family..."
(The Bluegrass Conspiracy, Sally Denton, pg. 60)
As we shall see, Halloran's construction companies were closely linked to the mob, which would provided ample incentive for the families member who ran them to keep quiet. On that note, let us turn our attention to Biff's concrete monopoly and his ties to Trump:
"... Biff Halloran, who'd supplied the concrete to the Hyatt, was also given the Trump Tower contract. Cody's drivers worked for Halloran's company, and the two were so closely links that Halloran had reciprocated with complementary services for Cody in a Manhattan hotel he owned. Halloran had in fact been questioned by federal prosecutors in Brooklyn about his hotel suite and other payoffs to Cody shortly before they spoke with Donald in 1980. Halloran was another one-time Cohn client who, according to the government, 'obtained his monopoly over the supply of readi-mix concrete through the direct intervention' of the mob, and was convicted in the federal racketeering case with Nick Auletta. While Halloran did, during the construction of Trump Tower, buyout the only other Manhattan-based concrete suppliers and establish a virtual monopoly, he had at least one wholly independent competitor at the time he was awarded the Trump job."
(Trump: The Greatest Show on Earth, Wayne Barrett, pg. 190)
While often overlooked, Biff Halloran was an extremely well connected figure in organized crime circles during this era. His connection to Trump especially significant in light of other, more reputable individuals Trump was courting in the early 1980s. In the next installment we shall consider the murky netherworld Halloran inhabited and the implications it has for other Trump associates.

Be warned, it is quite a journey down the rabbit hole, one that will amongst a Nazi-tinged right wing paramilitary outfit, the long alleged Son of Sam cult and the dirty dealings of Trump's chief political mentor. Stay tuned dear reader.


Goodfellas: The Dark Tower and Beyond Part II

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Welcome to the second installment in my examination of the Orange One's rather lengthy association with organized crime and even more sinister institutions. This series grew out of a prior blog I had published several months ago that detailed the curious saga of Resorts International, a gaming company that found itself at the center of a host of intrigues over the years.

Resorts had close ties to at least two American presidents --Trump and another controversial Republican, Richard M. Nixon --in addition to a rogue's gallery that included frequent patrons such as Howard Hughes and fugitive financier Robert Vesco; LSD baron William Mellon Hitchcock, who held stock in the company; and the inevitable Syndicate figures. It also owned a controlling interest in one of the earliest private intelligence companies. It was known as Intertel and it employed a host of "former" US intelligence personnel.

Intertel found itself at the center of scandal in the early 1970s, when it played a key role in what was either a rescue or an abduction of Howard Hughes from one of his Las Vegas casinos in 1970. Regardless, Hughes would be closely "guarded" Intertel agents for the rest of his life. During this time frame few were allowed even a glimpse of the reclusive billionaire until an unrecognizable corpse purporting to be Hughes turned up in 1976.

Intertel was still a part of Resorts in the late 1970s when the gaming interest began pushing for the legalization of gambling in Atlantic City. It would ultimately open up the first casino there and would begin construction on what became the Taj Mahal. It was at this juncture Trump became involved with the entity, buying a controlling interest in the company around 1986 and becoming its CEO. Eventually Trump was bought out by Merv Griffin, but he retained control of the Taj and became a key figure in the checkered history of Resorts.


But Resorts was hardly the first time Trump had operated in the ratified world of spooks and organized crime. As was noted in the first installment of this series, Trump had already established ample ties to the Five Families in addition to the Philadelphia crime family and even the emerging Russian Mafia by the mid-1980s.

Among these organized crime ties is one particular individual who leads into a whole other netherworld involving a shadowy private security company with its own ample ties to organized crime and intelligence agencies.


Mafia and Fort Bragg Intrigues

When I last left off I was detailing the exploits of Edward "Biff" Halloran, a reputed member of the Genovese crime family. Halloran, who owned multiple business including a hotel and racetrack, had established a near monopoly on the New York City concrete industry by the 1980s. It was in this capacity that he became involved with Trump, having provided the concrete to Trump's first building project, the Hyatt, in addition to his flagship building, Trump Tower (which, as noted in part one, was a longtime hot bed of money laundering for various criminal organizations). 

Prior to hooking up with Trump, Halloran had taken on a most interesting business partner during the early 1970s: Bradley Bryant.

Bryant was a product of Lexington, Kentucky, where he grew up in an upper middle glass family. His grandfather was in fact a former mayor of Lexington. He would later attend the exclusive Sewanee Military Academy where he gained many contacts in Lexington high society. He graduated in 1962 and a year later attempted to qualify for the Naval Academy at Annapolis, but was rejected. He later joined the Marines for a time before ending up in Philadelphia at the end of the 1960s, where he worked a corporate job.


In 1970, Halloran tapped Bryant to run the Armstrong Corporation, an industrial waste service Halloran ran out of Philadelphia. Bryant's tenure at Armstrong was most productive and he learned much from Halloran. In 1975 he started his own company and while successful, he soon became board with "legitimate" business. Shortly thereafter he began selling small quantities of drugs Lexington Police officer Andrew "Drew" Thornton had stolen from the department and suspects he shook down. Thornton had attended Sewanee with Bryant and the two had remained close friends ever since.

Thornton came from the same type of upper middle class background as Bryant, rubbing shoulders with Kentucky's gentry as youth while not actually be a part of them. He had joined the Lexington Police in 1968 and soon ended up on the city's first narcotics strike force. Many believed this move was to fill the void left by the derailment of a promising military career. In 1963 Thornton had joined the US Army and had insisted on becoming a paratrooper.

This led to Thornton being assigned to the 82nd Airborne Division at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. Regular readers of this blog will no doubt be aware of the significance of this move, but for those unaware: In addition to the 82nd Airborne, Fort Bragg is home to most of the nation's elite Special Operations Forces. Both the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) and the Army Special Forces (more commonly known as Green Berets) are headquarted there.


In more recent years Fort Bragg has also been at the heart of controversy surrounding potential right wing indoctrination there. As was noted before here, during the '90s several troops with Nazi leanings were convicted of murdering an African American couple in the nearby area. Also present at Fort Bragg during this time was Wade Michael Page, a white supremacist who would go on to shoot up a Sikh temple in 2012.

Curiously, one of Trump's key national security advisers, General Keith Kellogg was also present at Fort Bragg during this time, commanding Thornton's old unit, the 82nd Airborne. Thornton left the Army in 1965 due to an injury he suffered during the US invasion of the Dominican Republic during that same year. Kellogg reportedly didn't join the Army until '67, but a lot of his service record appears to have been recently scrubbed online. He graduated from high school in 1961, a year before Thornton, and appears to have decided on a military career due to his involvement with JROTC while in high school, but what he did between '61 and '67 and when his airborne training at Fort Bragg was undertaken is a mystery. While it is highly unlikely, there is a chance Thornton and Kellogg encountered one another during this time.

General Keith Kellogg
It is also interesting to note that right wing extremists were not the only products of Fort Bragg during the 1990s. During the early part of that decade, many of the founding members of the notorious Mexican drug cartel Los Zetas were also trained at Fort Bragg. The Zetas of course went on to become possibly the most notorious and certainly sophisticated drug cartel operating in Mexico for close to two decades now. By all accounts they've played a key role in destablizing the country, which is especially significant in light of the early involvement of the Fort Bragg-based Green Berets in what is commonly referred to as Operation Gladio (noted before here).

But almost two decades before the Zetas, another Fort Bragg alumni had already established a highly sophisticated drug-and-arms trafficking network domestically. And on that note, let us return to the matter at hand.


The Company  

Based on the success of the small scale dealings, Bryant and Thornton soon expanded their operations and the end results would be one of the most complex drug and arms trafficking organizations of the era.
"By the late seventies, the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA)... in Las Vegas had focused on Caesars Palace is the headquarters of a multimillion-dollar, international drug-smuggling organization the called itself 'The Company.' Whether a renegade offshoot of the CIA, which was commonly called 'the company' in intelligence circles, or not, it was a highly sophisticated, impenetrable enterprise. The DEA was force, with some embarrassment, to admit that 'The Company' surpassed the federal government's crime-fighting abilities. Codenaming the Caesars Palace drug trafficking and money-laundering probe Operation Jaeger, the DEA admitted in a highly confidential internal memorandums to Washington superiors that 'the magnitude, scope, and complexity of the operations' exceeded its field capabilities. At the heart of the Las Vegas investigation was a Texas highroller named Jamiel 'Jimmy' Chagra, an American drug kingpin tied to the Patriarca crime family in New England and the Chicago Syndicate."
(The Money and the Power, Sally Denton & Roger Morris, pg. 326)
Las Vegas' Caesars Palace, which we shall return too
Chagra is a most interesting figure whom shall be addressed in just a moment, but for now let us continue with the layout of "the Company." By the mid-1970s Bryant and Thornton already had wide-reaching ambitions as well as the means to pull them off.
"Bradley and Drew had formed Executive Protection Ltd. in 1975 – a corporation owned and operated by Bradley Bryant and Drew Thornton to which they would refer in private conversations as 'the Company.' But it wasn't until 1977 that the two men felt capable of putting 'the Company' into full-scale action. They recruited operatives, drawing from a pool of former police officers and drug agents from various state, local and federal agencies.
" 'The Company' could serve two purposes for them: to provide cover for drug-smuggling ventures and to serve as a legitimate private security service. Bradley had met dozens of people, through Chandler in Vegas and through Halloran in Philadelphia, who had the need and wherewithal to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for sophisticated bodyguard protection. Through their allies in the law enforcement and SOF world, they had plenty of contract employees to perform both security and drug trafficking services.
"Meanwhile the security company provided a perfect cover for acquiring weapons, assimilating a private army of enforcers and obtaining airplanes ostensibly needed to shuttle clients into foreign countries, from which Bradley and Drew could then import marijuana back to the United States...
"They had spent several years amassing the tools of their trade: AR-15s, Uzis, AK-47s, Ingrams, Walther PPKs, cartons of ammo, electronic surveillance equipment, nightscopes, explosives, night-vision goggles. Now it was time to put them to use.
 "Bradley claimed that his cousin, Larry Bryant, would help them add to their cache of arms, using his top-secret Defense Department security clearance to embezzle scopes and radar equipment from the highly restricted Navy weapons-testing center at China Lake in California's Mojave Desert.
"Forging a subsidiary partnership with his police colleague, Bill Canan, Drew bought a remote farm on a bluff overlooking the Kentucky River, where they would train their employees in guerrilla war tactics and hide their growing stash of weapons.
"Bradley and Drew also had a ready-make client base to buy their product. They had access to Kentucky's big-money horse crowd, the Philadelphia Main Line group, and the Vegas gamblers. Their blue-blood connections proved even stronger than they had anticipated, as they found Lexington society to be a huge market for illicit drugs. In fact, it was a larger market than they could supply.
"Both men considered Kentucky their strong and secret asset. Kentucky was a haven of remote landing strips, nonexistent law enforcement, crooked politicians, lax airports, and rivers leading to the Gulf of Mexico."
(The Bluegrass Conspiracy, Sally Denton, pgs. 64-65)
an Ingram Mac-10, which plays a curious role in our story

There's a lot to take in here. Many of these allegations will be examined in depth over the course of this blog, but for now I would like emphasize Biff Halloran's role in all of this. He clearly played a key role in setting up "the Company" with wealthy clientele during the early going in the Philadelphia area. This would have been shortly before Halloran began supplying concrete to Trump, but construction on the Grand Hyatt New York was well underway by the time "the Company" was at its peak of influence.

By the late 1980s Trump would develop quite an obsession with private security, accumulating what has been described as a private army at times. During the Company's peak years Trump likely didn't have the means for such services, but his path does seem to have frequently intersected with the Company's, as we shall see.

Before moving on, its worth emphasizing again the scale of Biff Halloran's reach. Not only did he help set up an extremely elaborate drugs-and-arm trafficking outfit in his early years, but he also played a key role in the rise of a future president. This is quite a feat for a mere member of the Genovesse crime family. Couple this with his shadowy disappearance in 1996, and one is left with quite a mystery.


About the Help

But back to the Company. Let's start by considering the personnel that Bryant and Thornton recruited. In addition to numerous former law enforcement officers, they also drew from the ranks of what the great Sally Denton referred to as the "Soldier of Fortune crowd."
"During the mid-1970s, Bradley and Drew had become deeply involved with what is known as the SOF crowd – a group of freelance military advisers and mercenaries whose unofficial leader is Robert Brown, the publisher of Soldier of Fortune magazine. How that association developed is not clear. Since both Bradley and Drew had been gung ho military types who fancied themselves as paramilitary experts, the SOF crowd was a natural melting pot. At the annual Las Vegas convention of soldiers of fortune, Bradley and Drew came into contact with a number of Vietnam veterans who were looking for action. 
"It was time, Bradley convinced Drew in 1977, to use those contacts for profit. Under the auspices of a private security firm, hiring independent contractors through the classified advertisements in Soldier of Fortune, they would find a retinue of pilots who weren't afraid of the risks and danger – pilots who enjoyed the challenge of flying below radar in the middle of the night and into remote jungle landing strips of foreign countries to pick up a load."
(The Bluegrass Conspiracy, Sally Denton, pgs. 63-64)
Robert K. Brown
The use of Robert K. Brown's Soldier of Fortune magazine to recruit pilots and mercs by Bryant and Thornton is most interesting. Brown himself has a long and storied history in covert operations and his magazine seems to have assisted the US intelligence community in this capacity for decades.

Prior to becoming a publisher, however, Brown was a soldier. He first entered the US Army in 1954 and served until '57. He then returned in '64 and participated in Vietnam. At some point he was trained in intelligence as well. Warren Hinckle and William Turner in their classic Deadly Secrets note "... Brown was a graduate of the counterintelligence school Fort Holabird, Maryland..." (pg. 180).

This is most interesting. Fort Holabird was specifically known for training the Army Counterintelligence Corp (CIC), which participated heavily in the Army's branch of Project ARTICHOKE. As was noted before here, ARTICHOKE experiments were conducted at Holabird during the mid-1950s as well. Unfortunately, I have been unable to determine when Brown went through Holabird.

By the time Brown was dispatched to Vietnam, he had become a Green Beret. As was noted above, Army Special Forces are based out of Fort Bragg and it is thus highly likely Brown went through airborne training at Fort Bragg at some point as part of his Green Beret training.

During Vietnam Green Berets were used extensively in the CIA's highly controversial Phoenix Program, which in some accounts is alleged to have killed up to 30,000 "insurgents." In Douglas Valentine's classic The Phoenix Program, Valentine indicates Brown was a participant in Phoenix and that he later started the "Phoenix Associates" in 1974 for veterans of the program.


During his time out of the service in the late 1950s and early 1960s Brown assisted in the efforts to overthrow Castro by training Cubans and enlisting American mercenaries in such efforts. Unsurprisingly, Brown has also been linked to the Kennedy assassination as well.
"... according to an FBI reports prepared in the wake of the JFK assassination, Brown 'advised that he had been active in Cuban matters for several years and during the spring of 1963, in connection with anti-Castro activity, he was in contact with the National States Rights Party in Los Angeles, California. In connection with this, he contacted Dr. Stanley L. Drennan (of North Hollywood, a Party activist). Brown stated that once while a guest at Dr. Drennan's home, Drennan stated in general conversation that he could not do it, but what the organization needed was a group of young men to get rid of Kennedy, the Cabinet and all members of Americans for Democratic Action and maybe 10,000 other people. Brown stated that he considered the remark as being "crackpot"; however, as tDrennan continued the conversation, he gained the impression that Drennan may have been propositioning him on this matter.' "
(Spooks, Jim Hougan, pg. 76n)
Brown stayed active in various intrigues after Vietnam as well. By the mid-1970s he was using Soldier of Fortune to recruit mercs to fight in various southern African nations such as Rhodesia. By the 1980s his efforts had gained near official sanction. In The Phoenix Program, Douglas Valentine notes that "... the person initially chosen by North to resupply the contras was former SOG commander John Singlaub, who in doing so worked with Soldier of Fortune publisher Robert Brown..." (pg. 428).

General John Singlaub
As was noted before here, General John Singlaub was a longtime darling of the far right in addition to a decades-spanning career in the blackest of black ops. Singlaub was a part of the infamous "China cowboys" clique of former OSS men that would continue to promote a far right agenda for decades in the US intelligence community. Another member was infamous arms dealer Mitchell WerBell III, another frequent collaborator of Brown's.

WerBell is a figure briefly addressed in the initial "Goodfellas" post dealing with Resorts International. During the mid-1970s WerBell partnered with rogue financier Robert Vesco, a frequent guest of Resorts' Paradise Island casino. At one point Vesco even considered purchasing said casino.

WerBell is worth dwelling on for a moment as there are many similarities between WerBell's operation and the Company's. For years WerBell aided the CIA and various corporate clients (WerBell famously plotted a coup in Haiti at the behalf of CBS during the 1960s that the network planned to film while it was in progress) in supplying various regimes with weapons in addition to assisting in the occasional coup. WerBell was also implicated in trafficking drugs at times, but not nearly to the extent of the Company.

WerBell
Like the Company, WerBell operated through various corporations such as Defense Services Inc (which provided arms and military training to various regimes) and the Military Armament Corporation (which manufactured the coveted Ingram Mac-10 and Mac-11 in addition to the silencers WerBell personally designed for the weapons). In total WerBell operated up to eight companies at one point, providing his operations with a degree legitimacy via reputable corporate and state clients.

Of course, WerBell had many less the reputable clients as well. There are longstanding rumors that some such clients received special training at compound WerBell owned in Georgia.
"... The Farm --sixty acres of rolling beauty-in-the-boondocks, located near Atlanta in Powder Springs. It might be thought that a lack of imagination gave The Farm its name, but that isn't so. One says 'The Farm' in much the same way that Bela Lugosi might say 'The La-bor-a-tory'; the name's emptiness is meant to hint at clandestine activities incapable of bearing the weight of sunlight. And, more specifically, it's meant to hint at (and even be confused with) the CIA training facility at Camp Peary, Virginia, also called The Farm.
"And like its government counterpart to the north, WerBell's Farm was not known for its contributions to agriculture or animal husbandry. It was instead devoted to perfecting the tools and techniques of sniping, counterinsurgency, and the coup d'etat. Weapons, men, and tactics of war were all tested on the elaborate shooting range that substituted for a garden."
(Spooks, Jim Hougan, pg. 29)
a little small arms training at The Farm
As was noted above, the Company had their own curious compound, which shall be addressed further in a moment.

While I've found no evidence of a direct connection between WerBell and the Company, it is highly probable that one existed. Beyond the similarities between both operations, both recruited heavily from Soldier of Fortune, run by WerBell's good friend and frequent collaborator, Robert K. Brown. As was noted above, Ingrams were one of the firearms the Company dealt in and WerBell was one of the largest distributors on Ingrams in the 1970s. What's more, he was not very discerning about whom he sold them too, so long as they were suitably anti-Communist (which the Company surely was).

Finally, Bradley Bryant relocated to Savannah, Georgia in the late 1970s on Company business. Most of WerBell's operations were also based out of Georgia, specifically Atlanta and the surrounding area. As such, it seems highly likely that the two operations were aware of one another. This researcher suspects that WerBell's operations may even have provided a kind of inspiration to Bryant and Thornton. But moving along.


The Drugs and Other Contraband

As was noted above, the first large scale drug suppliers the Company hooked up with were the Chagra brothers, Lee and Jimmy. Hailing from Texas, the Chagra brothers first gained notoriety while working as attorneys. They specialized in defending drug dealers and eventually the temptation to participate in that particular trade became too great. By the time the Chagras hooked up with the Company, they were considered to be among the largest suppliers of illicit drugs in the nation.
"The meeting of Bradley Bryant and Jimmy Chagra was a fortuitous combination of like-minded souls. Though the organization of Bradley and Drew had met with success, they couldn't have dreamed up a better association. In 1978 the Chagras were considered by the DEA to be the kingpins in the country's largest heroin, cocaine, marijuana, and firearms distribution system. Not only did the Chagras have their own cocaine and marijuana suppliers in Columbia, a source for Lebanese heroin, and connections to Middle Eastern terrorists, but their organized-crime connections in the United States were said to be at the highest levels of the traditional La Cosa Nostra."
(The Bluegrass Conspiracy, Sally Denton, pg. 73)
Jimmy Chagra
The partnership between the Company and the Chagra brothers was said to have grown out of Bradley Bryant's mob contacts in Las Vegas and Philadelphia (i.e. Biff Halloran). Frequently the Company and the Chagras conducted business at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas, which both parties used to launder money through. 

It was not long after the partnership was cemented that the Chagras began their fall from grace. It began with Lee Chagra being assassinated in December of 1978, likely on the orders of the Patriarca crime family

Then, in 1979, Jimmy Chagra was charged by federal authorities with drug trafficking. Chagra responded by ordering the assassination of the judge he faced in court, "Maximum" John Wood. The assassin? Charles Harrelson, an associate of the Dixie Mafia who also happened to be the father of actor Woody Harrelson. When authorities went to arrest Charles Harrelson for the murder of Wood, there was a brief standoff. During these tense moments, while Harrelson was high on cocaine, he confessed to both the assassination of Judge John Wood... and President John F. Kennedy. This has fueled speculation for years that Harrelson was one of the infamous "Three Tramps" on the Grassy Knoll. But I digress.


Around this same time Bradley Bryant would also start experiencing legal woes. Both Bryant and Jimmy Chagra ended up using the same attorney --the Las Vegas-based Oscar Goodman, who became legendary for his defense of organized crime figures while practicing law. Eventually both he and his wife would serve as mayor of Las Vegas. It was during Oscar's time as mayor that Donald Trump opened his first hotel in Vegas. Goodman would assist Trump in developing the site. But moving along.

Oscar Goodman (right) with Trump at the ribbon cutting ceremony for Trump's Vegas hotel
After Chagra's downfall and Bradley Bryant's subsequent arrest, Drew Thornton established another supplier: the Medellin Cartel. His contact with the Colombians was a most curious fellow as well. His name was Bertram Gordon, nominally a jet setting international businessman. In reality, Gordon was a key figure in the international drug market of the 1980s.
"The DEA believed that Gordon provided aircraft for the entire Medellin Cartel – the Colombian cocaine import and distribution network responsible for 80 percent of the cocaine entering the United States and Canada. Gordon, according to the DEA, worked directly for Carlos Lehder – the convicted Colombian billionaire whose cocaine empire was part of his political vision to destabilize America. 
"The reason the DEA knew so much about Bert Gordon was because Gordon worked for them..."
(The Bluegrass Conspiracy, Sally Denton. pgs. 349-350)
Yes, Bert Gordon, who was linked to Drew Thornton's mysterious death in 1984, was also a DEA informant in addition to being a close associate of Hitler-worshiping Carlos Lehder. Lehder's longstanding obsession with Nazism has been chronicled before here

Before wrapping up this section, its also interesting to note another curious piece of smuggling the Company engaged during the late 1970s: namely, the theft of classified weapons from the highly classified Naval Air Weapons Station China Lake facility. As was noted above, this feat was greatly aided by the assistance of Bradley Bryant's cousin, Larry Bryant, a Department of Defense civilian employee with Top Secret clearance. Here are a few more details about Larry and China Lake thefts.
"... Larry Bryant, about whether he had obtained the military equipment he had promised Bradley. Stationed at Nellis Air Force Base in Las Vegas, Larry Bryant possessed a national security clearance to work on classified radar systems, and had offered to provide Bradley with sophisticated electronic deception equipment from the government's top-secret China Lake.
"Bradley was especially anxious to receive several Starlight nightvision scopes and IFF Radar, called the 'Green Box.' The Green Box, nicknamed 'friend or foe,' is a classified devised that U.S. military aircraft used for communicating with other military installations and friendly countries. Such an instrument would allow Bradley's drug-smuggling aircraft to enter and leave numerous Central and South American countries, his planes sending a signal that they were friendly, without resorting to radio communication."
(The Bluegrass Conspiracy, Sally Denton, pgs. 83-84)

After the legal troubles began for the Bryants in 1980, Larry Bryant told authorities an interesting story while being questioned about how classified military hardware from China Lake had ended up in Bradley's possession.
"He claimed that several nightsscopes had been retrieved from China Lake to be traded to Libya for a Soviet radar system the Libyans had purchased from the Russians. The U.S. government wanted to examine the Russian system, according to Larry Bryant's scenario, in order to duplicate it. All of the China Lake employees implicated in the disappearance of the items were top-secret specialists in long-range, surface-to-air radar systems, as was Larry Bryant.
"Larry Bryant contended that the covert operation was going to save the US government millions of dollars in research and development costs. 'We're good guys; we work for Uncle Sam,' said one of the employees later indicted for pilfering the equipment."
(The Bluegrass Conspiracy, Sally Denton, pg. 127)
Specifically, the Bryants and other implicated China Lake employees claimed that the thefts were sanctioned by the CIA. By the time of the Bryants' arrest, Bradley and Drew Thornton had been claiming their operations were sanctioned by the CIA for several years. More than a few of the federal employees tasked with investigating the Company had come to similar conclusions.

Keep the allegations concerning Libya in mind dear reader, as we shall return to this point in the next installment. For now, there is one final aspect of the Company's operation I would like to address before wrapping up.


Triad

Finally, we come to the mysterious compound the Company operated in rural Kentucky. It was operated by a corporation Bryant and Thornton founded called Triad and soon drew the attention of both local residents and federal agents for the strange happenings there. Some dealt with more concrete concerns, such as indications the compound was being used to stockpile arms and engage in paramilitary training.
"Other federal agencies had also been enticed by rumors of arms-stockpiling and mercenary training at Triad. U.S. Customs agents in New York, who were monitoring the activities of Saudi arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi, briefly entertained the possibility that Triad was a subsidiary of Khashoggi's Triad American Corporation. The fact that Khashoggi was frequenting Lexington added fuel to the speculation.
"...The FBI in Lexington had received reports that foreign 'dark-skinned' soldiers of unknown nationality – possibly Libyan or Nicaraguan – were being trained at Triad in guerrilla warfare techniques. Some of the report suggested the Triad was CIA-sponsored... ATF had conducted an investigation into activities at Triad that had concluded that those attending the 'camp' were 'survivalists who on occasion dress in military fatigues and play war games – i.e., shoot each other with plastic bullets containing red blood-like dye, parachute from airplanes, firearms training, etc.' Triad evidently offered training in self-defense, advanced first aid, radiation detection, and the perfection of individual survival skills. ATF investigators found that trainees rappelled off the back cliffs of the farm down to the Kentucky river bed, while avoiding automatic fire. But ATF found 'no information indicating any connection between above-described activity and foreign/domestic terrorism, guerrilla warfare, and other activity possibly in violation of neutrality laws.' "
(The Bluegrass Conspiracy, Sally Denton, pgs. 114-115)
Right. A few "survivalist" types were able to come up with the cash to keep such an elaborate operation profitable. And a threat later made to state police who had infiltrated the compound --that the Company would shoot down any more surveillance flights the state police sent over the compound --was just in jest.

Before moving on to other allegations surrounding the compound, it is interesting to note its connection the infamous arms trafficker Adnan Khashoggi. For years Khashoggi was a key CIA asset who may have also been plugged into Le Cercle, an international fascist network (noted before here) of some notoriety.

Khashoggi
Khashoggi was also a friend and some time rival of the Orange One. They frequently encountered one another in New York social circles during the 1980s and Trump reportedly designed his apartment living room in Trump Tower to be larger than the one Khashoggi had in his Olympic Tower apartment. Trump eventually bought Khashoggi's "megayacht," the Nabila and renamed it the Trump Princess, But moving along.

Probably the strangest aspect of the Triad compound are the allegations encountered by state cop Ralph Ross, for years the lead investigator of Drew Thornton in Kentucky, of occult activity at the compound.
"Coincidentally, Ralph had suddenly been receiving complaints about suspicious activity on Triad. Neighbors had reported to state police that a cult of devil worshipers frequented the property, and that the constant firing automatic weapons could be heard..."
(The Bluegrass Conspiracy, Sally Denton, pg. 114)
This takes us into some truly muddy waters. As I'm sure fans of the late, great David McGowan are well aware, there have been allegations for decades of paramilitary training compounds spread out across the nation with an occult flavor that "trained" various serial killers.

These allegations probably originate with infamous serial killer Henry Lee Lucas, who in the 1980s claimed to a member of a cult he called the Hand of Death. As was noted before here, Lucas alleged that this cult trained out of a paramilitary compound located in the Florida Everglades. While nominally this claim seems ridiculous, it is important to remember that anti-Castro Cubans were being trained in paramilitary camps in the Everglades up until at least the early 1960s. What's more, this training was largely being overseen by the same mercenaries who would later gravitate to Robert K. Brown's Soldier of Fortune crowd. Brown himself was quite active in assisting the anti-Castro Cubans during the early 1960s as well.

Henry
Carlos Lehder, the Hitler-worshiping Medellin Cartel associate who would end up supplying Thornton, also had an interesting connection to this anti-Castro Cuban crowd as well. During the height of his influence, he set up shop on Norman's Cay in the Bahamas, which was used as a base for Lehder's operations as well as resupplies for cocaine being shipped from Columbia to North America. As was noted before here, before Lehder took possession of the island, it was used by anti-Castro Cubans and American mercenaries to stage raids on Cuba. Robert Vesco, the fugitive financier who collaborated with WerBell in the 1970s and frequented visited Resorts' Paradise Island casino during that decade, was also a regular guest of Lehder's at Norman's Cay during the 1980s. But back to the matter at hand.

As was noted before here, Henry' claim was further bolstered by the discovery of Adolfo Constanzo's ranch near Matamoros, Mexico (which is directly across the border from Brownsville, Texas) in 1989. Constanzo was a Cuban-American occultist who became a major figure in the Mexican drug trade during the 1980s. Constanzo and his followers were believed to have performed human sacrifices at this ranch in addition to storing large amounts of contraband there. Prior to the discovery of the ranch, Lucas had alleged the Hand of Death kept a ranch near Matamoros for such purposes. It is also interesting to note that Constanzo was almost surely an affiliate of the Gulf Cartel, which the above-mentioned Los Zetas originally belonged to as enforcers before breaking away (noted before here).

Constanzo
All of this leads me to believe there is merit to these allegations of paramilitary compounds. Certainly both the Company and Mitchell WerBell maintained such places during the 1970s and were reported to have trained some curious figures there. Henry Lee Lucas' alleged Florida Everglades site has precedence with the sites used by anti-Castro Cubans in the early 1960s, a network that both Robert K. Brown and Mitch WerBell were deeply involved with.And of course there's the possibility that Constanzo, who was born in Miami during the early 1960s, was raised in such circles.

While this might seem like a strange digression, I would further expand of this serial killer cult theme in the next installment. Also up for consideration Bryant and Thornton's contacts in Lexington's upper crust as well as further ties Trump has to the Company. And finally, I may even get around to considering the implications of it all. Stay tuned dear reader.


Goodfellas Part III: Viva Las Vegas

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Welcome to the third installment in what began as a series centered around the organized crime ties of President Donald J. Trump, aka the Orange One. This series in turn grew out of a prior blog I wrote several months ago that considered Trump's ties to a mysterious gaming company known as Resorts International.

Resorts grew out of a Florida-based company known as the Mary Carter Paint Company, which was established in the early 1960s. At the time Mary Carter was believed to be a CIA front used to assist anti-Castro Cubans bent on overthrowing Castro. Over the course of this present series we've encountered more than a few individuals who traveled in the same circles. But more on that in a moment.

By the late 1960s Mary Carter remade itself as Resorts International and established a famed casino on Paradise Island, the first such operation in the Bahamas. The Paradise Island casino soon became a popular destination for Overworld figures such as then-President Richard M. Nixon and reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes. It also became a hotspot for less reputable figures, such as fugitive financier Robert Vesco, Vatican deep state operator Cardinal Paul Marcinkus (noted before here), various Lansky associates and Richard Mellon Hitchcock, who at one point was the banker for the largest LSD smuggling operation in the world.

Around this time Resorts also established its own private intelligence company, which was known as Intertel. Staffed with numerous "former" US intelligence veterans, Intertel first gained notoriety in 1970 for the role it played in the mysterious rescue (or abduction, depending upon one's point of view) of Howard Hughes. Intertel would continue to function as Hughes own personal security detail for the rest of his life, a time period in which few would even see the reclusive billionaire in the flesh.

Howard Hughes
Resorts would also play a key role in opening up Atlantic City to legalized gambling and it was in this capacity that the Orange One began his relationship with the company. Prior to the death of Resorts founder and longtime CEO James Crosby Trump became friendly with much of the board and made a takeover effort upon Crosby's death in 1986. Trump eventually wound up as CEO, but then faced his own takeover bid, which was mounted by Merv Griffin. Griffin eventually ended up with Resorts, but Trump acquired the Company's crown jewel, the Taj Mahal.


Resorts was hardly Trump's first brush with organized crime or the deep state, however. As was noted in the first installment of this series, Trump had begun relations with the Syndicate via the Five Families and the Philadelphia crime family from the time of his earliest building projects in the late 1970s. He would also indirectly end up in a business relationship with infamous private detective Robert Maheu, a longtime CIA asset who had managed Hughes' business empire for well over a decade before he was "rescued" by Resorts' Intertel operators.

One of the most curious figures Trump wound up in bed with was Edward "Biff" Halloran, a reputed Genovese crime family member who owned a host of business operations in the NYC/New Jersey and Philadelphia areas. Halloran ran race tracks, hotels and had a virtual monopoly on concrete in the NYC area during the 1980s, which was the basis of his business relationship with Trump. Halloran disappeared mysteriously in 1996 and has not be heard from since.

During the 1970s one of Halloran's business partners was an ambitious young man from Kentucky named Bradley Bryant. As was noted in the second installment of this series, Bryant would go on to establish an elaborate drugs-and-arms trafficking operation that masqueraded as a private security operation known as Executive Protection, Ltd.

Bryant's partner in all of this was a fellow Kentuckian known as Andrew Carter "Drew" Thornton, a former US Army paratrooper and Lexington cop with far right leanings. Bryant was himself an ex-Marine and their operation drew extensively from the ranks of "former" police and military officers. Frequently they recruited through Soldier of Fortune, a mercenary magazine run by Robert K. Brown. Brown as a former Green Beret who had participated extensively in anti-Castro operations during the early 1960s in Florida and who laid supply "military advisers" for CIA efforts in Central America during the 1980s.

Robert K. Brown
"The Company," as Bryant and Thornton came to call their operation, was also widely believed by state and federal law enforcement to be a CIA front as well. And a key figure in setting up Bryant and Thornton with their initial crop of clients was none other than Trump's frequent business partner, Biff Halloran.


Beyond the Biff

But Halloran was hardly Trump's only link to Bryant and Thornton. Before getting to that, however, I must address how Bryant hooked up with Halloran in the first place. Bryant's relationship with Halloran derived from contacts amongst the local gentry centered around the famed Kentucky Derby
"... Bradley had obtained a high-paying corporate executive position, thanks to his friendship with John Young Brown, Jr. – the fast-food wizard who had made millions with his Kentucky Fried Chicken empire. Bradley had gotten to know Brown when his younger sister Lynne married one of Brown's best friends – Dan Chandler. Chandler, the wayward son of former Kentucky governor A.B. 'Happy' Chandler, worked for 'John Y.,' as everyone called the chicken magnet, in the franchise business. The marriage of Lynne Bryant to Dan Chandler signaled Bradley's inclusion into a slightly older, and more solidly entrenched, generation of bluebloods. Chandler and Brown were like big brothers to Bradley, and their fast crowd of jet setters and gamblers appealed to Bradley's adventurous streak. Through them, Bradley met his future partner – a Philadelphia multimillionaire named Edward 'Biff' Halloran, who was a regular at the Kentucky Derby. Chandler was more than happy to take credit for launching Bradley's career. When Chandler and Brown introduced Bradley to Halloran, Bradley was working as a flak in Frankfort for the state governments – a patronage position Chandler had helped Bradley land..."
(The Bluegrass Conspiracy, Sally Denton, pgs. 59-60)
Not only did John Y. Brown play a key role in launching KFC as a major international food chain, but he also held stakes in other chains such as Roadhouse Grill, Texas Roadhouse and Kenny Rogers Roasters at various times. During the 1970s, he also owned various professional sports franchises such as the Kentucky Colonels, the Buffalo Braves and the famed Boston Celtics. Then, in 1980, Brown was elected as governor of Kentucky just as the Company's operations were going into high gear.

John Y.
For our purposes here, the most compelling of Brown's business ventures was the purchase of the Lum's chain of restaurants from the founders, Stuart and Clifford Perlman, during the early 1970s. Prior to the transaction Lum's had also been the owners of Caesars Palace in Las Vegas which, as noted in part two, was later used a place of money laundering by the Company and other gangsters by the later 1970s. Officially the Perlmans retained control of Caesars after selling Lum's, but there have long been allegations that Brown had a stake in the casino.
"Less than a month later he paid $4 million for three-hundred Lum's restaurants and franchise rights. What began in 1956 as a Miami beach hot-dog stand had been parlayed by Clifford and Stuart Perlman into an international chain, enriching the brothers and enabling the weenie czars to purchase Caesars Palace in 1969 four $58 million.
"Through a complicated series of financial transactions, John Y. made Jimmy Lambert president of two companies that bought the Lums restaurants from Caesars World, Inc., then sold them to John Y. The machinations – which were further clouded by false press releases issued to newspapers – were scrutinized by Nevada gambling authorities, who wondered if John Y. was acquiring a 'hidden interest' in Caesars. Speculation increased when John Y. insisted that his lackey Dan Chandler be given an executive position in Caesars, ostensibly threatening to take his gambling business to another casino if Caesars refused to employ Chandler."
(The Bluegrass Conspiracy, Sally Denton, pgs. 164-165)
That would be the same Dan Chandler who introduced Bradley Bryant to Biff Halloran and who was still employed by Caesars when Bradley and Drew Thornton began using it launder drug money. The above-mentioned Jimmy Lambert was also well connected in organized crime circles as well, with contacts that included Thornton and even Meyer Lansky. Lambert made numerous trips to Florida to pow wow with Lansky and his associates, while frequently staying at properties owned by John Y.

Lambert and his organized crime connections eventually became a major issue of John Y. during his 1983 reelection bid. In June of that year The New York Times charged that "Lambert was a courier for Brown, carrying hundreds of thousands of dollars from Las Vegas back to Kentucky" (The Bluegrass Conspiracy, pg. 309-310), among other allegations. It also came to light that Brown was likely a silent partner in a crime-riddled nightclub Lambert owned in Cincinnati. Amusingly, it was named Trumps.

With all of these connections, there has been longstanding speculation that John Y. Brown was familiar with the Company's operations. Another Lexington high society figure, Anita Madden --a friend of John Y.'s whose raunchy Kentucky Derby balls have become legendary ---was also linked to the Company as well. Drew Thornton and many other Lexington police who fell in with the Company had provided Mrs. Madden security for her parties and there are indications that her ties had grown deeper to the operation --via Lambert --over the years. Mrs. Madden will be quite significant in a future installment, so do keep her in mind.

Anita Madden
But back to the matter at hand, namely Donald Trump. The thing is, Trump had become quite active in the same social circles as many of the elite backers of the Company by the mid-1970s. It likely began with the Orange One's obsession with casinos.
"There was always something about the prospect of owning a casino that intrigued Donald Trump. As far back as 1976, before he consummated a single real estate deal in New York, he was telling reporters he would build the world's largest casino in Las Vegas and name it Xanadu. By then Donald had already made the first of what would become repeated pilgrimages to Vegas, not to gamble, but to visit Caesars Palace and the other cash farms stretched out along the strip."
(Trump: The Greatest Show on Earth, Wayne Barrett, pg. 202)
Trump was reportedly a regular at Caesars throughout the late 1970s when, as was noted in the prior installment, it was a mecca for organized crime figures to launder drug money at. At the time Bradley Bryant was a regular there while Dan Chandler, his brother-in-law and a good friend of John Y. Brown, held an executive post at Caesars.

Caesars Palace
By at least the early 1980s Trump would become a regular at the Kentucky Derby --which also attracted many key figures linked to the Company, including John Y. Brown, Dan Chandler, Jimmy Lambert, Anita Madden and of course Biff Halloran. In 1983 Trump was a guest at the Derby Eve Gala, hosted by John Y. Brown and also attended by Bill and Hillary Clinton. Reportedly at this event Jimmy Lambert had arranged for a considerable donations to Brown's reelection campaign by the Clintons and a certain reputed organized crime figure.
"In 1996, a published biography of Bill and Hillary Clinton, Partners in Power, reveals that Lambert had also been the conduit for some $300,000 in cash given to then-Govornor John Y. Brown by Clinton and Brown intimate Dan Lasater, a fast-food and bond brokerage millionaire suspected of ties to organized crime and who would later be convicted himself on drug charges. According to FBI records, Brown through Lambert had asked for a million dollars at the time, but Lasater had decided to give 'only' $300,000, conveyed in a brown paper bag aboard Lasater's Lear Jet as he flew the Clintons to the 1983 Derby, where the two governors and their wives would socialize as usual..."
(The Bluegrass Conspiracy, Sally Denton, pgs. 369-370) 
Brown and his then-wife, Phyllis George, would maintain close ties with the Clintons for years to come. However, in the immediate future, they would move into one of Trump's properties. After losing his reelection bid Brown and George became some of the first tenets at Trump Tower --which, as noted in part one, was fast becoming a center of money laundering in its own right.

While comparisons have often been made between Brown and Bill Clinton --and not unjustly as both men have a similar personal style --Brown seems to have served as something of role model for Trump as well. Both men are tycoons that had no political experience before being elected. Both men also leaned heavily on the business community to staff their administration with. And both men seem to have risen through the ranks thanks to similar shadowy interests.

From the 1983 Derby Eve Gala, which appears to have been riddled with intrigue: John Y Brown, Phyllis George and Donald Trump are the three standing up; Hillary Clinton is seated at the far left
Of course, none of this represents a smoking gun tying Trump to the Company and its network. But it is all very suggestive, none the less. Trump starts making pilgrimages to Las Vegas in the mid-1970s and by the end of the decade his first major construction project is off the ground. He's greatly aided in this project by Biff Halloran --a former business partner of Bradley Bryant's who helped set Bryant up with clientele for the Company. Halloran is also a regular at the Kentucky Derby and friendly with John Y. Brown, who helped set Bryant up with Halloran in the first place. By the early 1980s Trump is making the Kentucky Derby scene and branching into the gaming industry in Atlantic City. By 1984 John Y moves into Trump's flagship property, which is also beginning to establish itself as a mecca for money laundering in much the same way Caesars Palace had been a few years ago.

John Y's close friend and Bradley Bryant's brother-in-law Dan Chandler was an executive at Caesars during this time and John Y was suspected of having a hidden interest in the casino. This claim is further bolstered by Jimmy Lambert's reported trips to Kentucky from Vegas with payments for Brown. And then Brown turns up living at another money laundering operation that was built with assistance of his friend, Biff Halloran.

Is this all a mere coincidence?


The Puppet Master

And if not, a compelling question becomes: who sent Trump on these initial pilgrimages to Las Vegas that seem to have resulted in him traveling the same circles was John Y. Brown?

While I've found no evidence of it, my suspicion is that the individual in question was Trump's longtime attorney and political mentor Roy Cohn. Cohn first gained notoriety in the 1950s when he served as Joseph McCarthy's lead attorney for his Communist witch hunts. While this ended in McCarthy's disgrace, Cohn returned to New York City where he established a highly lucrative legal practice and began known as the city's premier "fixer." Cohn's influence were legendary. So were his organized crime ties.
"With clients who ranged from John Gotti to the sons of Carlo Gambino, Cohn reportedly hosted gatherings of the commission itself – which included the heads of the five crime families – at his town house. His closest mob confidant and client, Tony Salerno, was so involved in Atlantic City that he was believed to have sanction the murders of the hit man who killed Scarfo's predecessor, boasting on federal tapes: 'I'm the fucking boss, that's who I am. Connecticut is mine; New Jersey is mine.' One Cohn aide specifically remembers a 1983 get-together at Cohn's town house living room that supposedly included the lawyer and his two clients – Trump and Salerno – right around the time that Salerno's S&A concrete was building Trump Plaza, the Third Avenue residential tower..."
(Trump: The Greatest Show on Earth, Wayne Barrett, pg. 244)
"Fat Tony" Salerno
The above-mentioned Commission was the ruling body of the Syndicate where the Five Families and other organizations made decisions concerning their activities. If Cohn was serving as host of such functions, he was very high in the Syndicate indeed. And --as was noted in part one --he was the man who had introduced Trump to Biff Halloran in the first place. Naturally, both men were clients of Cohn's. Cohn also had longstanding ties to Syndicate players in Vegas, as shall be noted in a moment.

Cohn was also the man who put Trump in contact with Overworld figures such as Roger Stone and Rupert Murdoch who would play key roles in his political rise. In point of fact, Cohn appears to have been one of the leading figures behind the rise of Murdoch's media empire in the States. Cohn not only got Murdoch access to the Oval Office, but also the CIA. Consortium News recently noted:
"Rupert Murdoch, the global media mogul who is now a kingmaker in American politics, was brought into those power circles by the infamous lawyer/activist Roy Cohn who arranged Murdoch’s first Oval Office meeting with President Ronald Reagan in 1983, according to documents released by Reagan’s presidential library.
"In a photograph of the Jan. 18, 1983 meeting, Cohn is shown standing and leaning toward Reagan who is seated next to Murdoch. Following that meeting, Murdoch became involved in a privately funded propaganda project to help sell Reagan’s hard-line Central American policies, according to other documents. That PR operation was overseen by senior CIA propaganda specialist Walter Raymond Jr. and CIA Director William Casey, but the details of Murdoch’s role remain sketchy partly because some of the records are still classified more than three decades later."
Cohn has long been reputed to have been involved in some of the darkest operations of the US intelligence community. These ties probably first came to light around 1970 with the publication of the highly controversial "Torbitt document." This document alleged that the JFK assassination had been carried out by a cabal of far right wing FBI men of Division 5, NASA, the Defense Industrial Security Command and the inevitable ex-Nazis and Syndicate figures. This cabal was organized around a Basil-based corporation known as Permindex, which later relocated to Italy with the name of Centro-Mondiale Commerciale. According to Torbitt, Permindex had four primary goals:
"1. To fund and direct assassinations of European, Mid-East and world leaders considered threats to the Western World and to petroleum interests of the backers.
"2. To furnish couriers, agents, and management in transporting, depositing and rechanneling funds through Swiss banks for Las Vegas, Miami, Havana and international gambling syndicate.
"3. To co-ordinate the espionage activities of the Solidarists and Division Five of the FBI with groups in sympathy with their objectives and to receive and channel funds and arms from the financiers to the action groups.
"4. To build, acquire and operate hotels and gambling casinos in the Caribbean, Italy and at other tourist areas..."
(NASA, Nazis & JFK, various, pgs. 48-49)
Of course, this sounds remarkably like the operations overseen by the Company (as outlined in part two of this series) and Resorts International (noted before here). Torbitt singled out Las Vegas in particular as a key cog in the international operations of Permindex and as we've seen thus far, Vegas did serve as a kind of base of operations for the Company. And Trump's business empire (which was built in part upon hotels and casinos) appears to have begun with his pilgrimages to Las Vegas. Do keep this in mind as Vegas shall crop up again and again through out this series.

While the claims made by Torbitt concerning Permindex remain highly, highly controversial, it seems all but certain the corporation was tied to both the US intelligence community and the Fascist International and that it has been linked to at least two very notable assassinations.
"...When the announcement for Permindex was first made in Switzerland in late 1956, its principal backing was to come from a local banker named Hans Seligman. But as more investigation by the local papers was done, it became clear that the real backer was J. Henry Schroder Banking Corporation. This information was quite revealing. Schroder's had been closely associated with Allen Dulles and the CIA for years. Allen Dulles's connection to the Schroder banking family went back to the thirties when his law firm, Sullivan and Cromwell, first began representing them through him. Later, Dulles was the bank's General Counsel. In fact, when Dulles became CIA Director, Schroder's was a repository for a fifty million dollar contingency fund the Dulles personally controlled. Schroder's was a welcome conduit because the bank benefited from previous CIA overthrows in Guatemala and Iran. Another reason that there began to be a furor over Permindex in Switzerland was the fact that the banks founder, Baron Kurt von Schroder, was associated with the Third Reich, specifically Heinrich Himmler. The project now became stalled in Switzerland. It now moved to Rome...
"...The Board of Directors was made up of bankers who had been tied up with fascist governments, people who worked the Jewish refugee racket during World War II, a former member of Mussolini's cabinet, and the son-in-law of Hjalmar Schact, the economic wizard behind the Third Reich... There were at least four international newspapers that exposed the bizarre activities of Permindex when it was in Rome. One problem was the mysterious source of funding: no one knew where it was coming from or going to. Another was that its activities reportedly included assassination attempts on French Premier Charles de Gaulle. Which would make sense since the founding member of Permindex, Ferenc Nagy, was a close friend of Jacques Soustelle. Soustelle was a leader of the OAS, a group of former French officers who broke with de Gaulle over his Algerian policy. They later made several attempts on the de Gaulle's life, which the CIA was privy to. Again, this mysterious source of funding, plus the rightwing, neo-Fascist directors created another wave of controversy. One newspaper wrote that the organization may have been 'a creature the CIA... set up as a cover for the transfer of CIA... funds in Italy for illegal political-espionage activities.' The Schroder connection would certainly suggest that."
(Destiny Betrayed, James DiEugenio, pgs. 385-386)

Permindex's link to the JFK assassination came via one of its most notorious members: international business man and reputed CIA asset Clay Shaw. Shaw was famously one of the individuals charged in attorney Jim Garrison's investigation in the Kennedy assassination in New Orleans. In the Oliver Stone film JFKShaw was portrayed by Tommy Lee Jones.

The "Torbitt document" also alleges that Roy Cohn was a key member of Permindex, but I have been unable to confirm this. Among other things, the "Torbitt document" claims that Cohn was using the Lionel Corporation to funnel money to Syndicate interests in Vegas. I initially found this claim to be ridiculous as Lionel was chiefly known for making children's toys, most notably their legendary toy trains. And yet I later found that there was some merit to these claims:
"... Roy Cohn, former chief counsel to Senator Joe McCarthy – and a close friend of both Hoover and H. L. Hunt – was indicted by a federal grand jury in September 1963 on eight counts in a stock-fraud case... Cohn's Lionel Corporation was deeply enmeshed with Las Vegas gambling interests, which provided the basis for his indictment."
(The Man Who Knew Too Much, Dick Russell, pg. 523)
J. Edgar Hoover and oil baron H.L. Hunt were allegedly two of the key backers behind the Permindex network, according to Torbitt. Hunt, a former "professional gambler" who parlayed his winnings into ownership of half the oil fields in West Texas, had longstanding ties to organized crime. As I noted before here, he was surely a key figure in the Kennedy assassination.

H.L Hunt
For his part, Cohn's hatred of the Kennedys was well known.
"It was a smart move hiring Cohn, who not only had a reputation as 'the toughest, meanest, vilest, and one of the most brilliant lawyers in America,' but who also hated the Kennedys, particularly Bobby, who had never forgiven Cohn for beating him to the post of chief counsel on Joe McCarthy's Senate subcommittee back in 1953..."
(Nemesis, Peter Evans, pg. 235)
Cohn would go on to become the New York attorney for Aristotle Onassis, the billionaire Greek shipping magnet who married JFK's widow, Jackie Kennedy, in the late 1960s. This was reportedly done out of spite as Onassis deeply loathed the Kennedy brothers as well. In Nemesis, award winning journalist Peter Evans even alleged the Onassis had put up the money to have Robert Kennedy assassinated in 1968.

Cohn's ties to Onassis bring to mind another famed conspiracy document from the 1970s: the Gemstone File. Among other allegations, Gemstone fingers Onassis as the key figure behind the assassinations of both Kennedy brothers. It also sketches out a cabal similar to Torbitt's, in which the Syndicate is in alliance with various US intelligence assets and shadowy international businessmen. Curiously, Gemstone also alleges that Onassis effectively kidnapped his chief rival, Howard Hughes, and kept the reclusive billionaire a prisoner while stealthy managing his business empire.

Aristotle Onassis
This syncs with the allegations long surrounding Resorts International, noted before here, that the gambling interest had abducted Hughes via Intertel and was holding the reclusive billionaire prisoner while overseeing his business empire. It is interesting to note that Onassis has an indirect link to Resorts via Paul Helliwell, the former OSS China hand who would establish a vast overseas banking empire the CIA would use to covertly fund its black ops. Peter Evans alleges that Onassis had conspired at one point with Helliwell and our old friend Mitchell WerBell III (noted in the prior installment) to stage a coup in Haiti.

Around the same time Helliwell also had dealings with Resorts.
"The bank [Castle Bank and Trust --Recluse] was established by Paul Helliwell, a former OSS China hand with a background in drug-trade intelligence. After the war, Helliwell had run CIA front companies in Florida. Through his Bahamian bank, and a companion institution in Florida, millions of dollars were funneled for covert military operations staged off Andros Islands in the Bahamas. Castle also facilitated tax evasion, and, in its trust-company capacity, voted the shares of certain nonresident owners of Resorts International, the top Lansky-era casino operation on Nassau. When one of their shareholders so strongly objected to the way Castle was voting his shares that he sued the bank, the scheme began to unravel."
(Hot Money, R.T. Naylor, pg. 315)
And the shareholder who sued Helliwell's infamous Castle Bank & Trust? Why, none other William Mellon Hitchcock (who was addressed at length before here), one of Resorts most notorious shareholders.

While all of this may seem like a bit of a digression, Mr. Billy, as friends referred to Hitchcock, will pop up again in our saga in a most striking capacity.

Mr. Billy is to the right
But let us now return to Roy Cohn. While there is nothing definitive linking him to the assassinations of either Kennedy brother, his hatred of them was well known and he was already well connected in the same right wing circles long linked to both assassinations by the early 1960s. He was also well established with Vegas Syndicate hands by this time as well, as evidenced by the indictments he faced over his management of the Lionel Corporation.

Even without being a member of Permindex, it is clear Cohn was an extremely powerful and well-connected figure, one responsible for arguably the most powerful media baron of the twenty-first century and certainly the most controversial American president of this same century. Even over thirty years after his death Cohn's influence is still vast.

And yet nothing has thus far explained the basis of his power. Cohn rose to prominence during the McCarthy hearings, but while Tail Gunner Joe's career was thoroughly ruined over said hearings, Cohn emerged even more powerful than ever. What was Cohn tied up in that made him so coveted by high ranking mobsters and billionaires in equal measure? Were his legal skills simply that good, or was there something else.

This researcher opts for the later and will explore the likely source of Cohn's influence in the next installment. Stay tuned dear reader.


Goodfellas Part IV: Lavender Mafia Edition

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Welcome to the fourth installment in a series that began as an examination of the ties between President Donald J. Trump and organized crime. This series grew out of a prior blog I had published in October of 2017 that considered his brief tenure as CEO of the infamous gaming interest known as Resorts International.

As was noted there, Resorts was a major powerhouse during its heyday of the early 1970s. Its famed casino on Paradise Island in the Bahamas frequently attracted such Overworld figures as President Richard M. Nixon and reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes during this era. But in addition to Hughes, guests also included rogue financier Robert Vesco and Vatican bank head Paul Marcinkus (noted before here), who would end up knee deep in his own financial scandals by the early 1980s.

But in addition to the rogue financiers, there was also shareholders such as William Mellon Hitchcock, who at one time was the banker for the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, the largest LSD smuggling network in the world. Hitchcock and other shareholders had their accounts managed by the Castle Bank & Trust, an infamous CIA-linked institution that has long been used to launder the proceeds from drug and arms sells. And the casino itself was heavily staffed by various Mafioso, many linked to Meyer Lansky.

Probably the most curious aspect of Resorts, however, was its ownership of a private intelligence agency known as Intertel. Staffed extensively by many "former" US intelligence assets, Intertel first gained notoriety in 1970 when it "rescued" Howard Hughes from his Las Vegas residence. Hughes was rarely seen in the flesh again after this event and there has been much speculation for years that Intertel had kidnapped Hughes with an eye towards taking over his vast business empire.

Howard Hughes
Intertel was still a part of Resorts when Trump became CEO in 1986. His control of Resorts was brief, with the Orange One selling his share to Merv Griffin in exchange for the Taj Mahal in 1988. Still, Trump would come into contact with some major figures in both the organized crime and intelligence communities during his tenure as CEO of the gaming interest.

But, as we saw in part one of this series, Trump was already well acquainted with the Syndicate by this time. When of his key early backers was a reputed member of the Genovese crime family known as Edward "Biff" Halloran. As was noted in the second installment of this series, Halloran was a former business partner of Bradley Bryant, who by the late 1970s was operating a vast drug and arms trafficking network known as "the Company." Halloran played a key role in getting the Company off the ground during the late 1970s when had also begun to work with Trump.

Both Bryant and his business partner, Andrew "Drew" Thornton, were both military veterans and the Company recruited heavily from such ranks to staff their operation. They leaned heavily on Soldier of Fortune magazine for personnel. The magazine's founder, Robert K. Brown, had very extensive ties to the CIA. In general, it was widely believed by law enforcement personnel that investigated the Company that it had some type of relationship with the CIA.


As was noted in part three, Halloran was not Trump's only tie to the Company. Beginning in the mid-1970s, Trump began making frequent pilgrimages to Caesars Palace in Las Vegas, which was being used extensively by the Company to launder drug money at the time. By the early 1980s he had become a regular on the Kentucky Derby set, which featured many Kentucky politicians and business people in league with the Company. One of them was Governor John Y. Brown, who would go on to move into Trump Tower in 1984 after he lost his reelection bid, thanks in no small part to allegations concerning his ties to the Company. Around this time Trump Tower become a mecca for laundering dirty money, as was noted in part one, not unlike how Caesars Palace had been used in the prior decade. As was noted in part three, John Y. was believed to be a hidden owner of Caesars during this era before moving on to Trump Tower in the 1980s.

As I wrapped up the installment, I began to consider the background of the man who likely initiated Trump into these circles, namely his longtime attorney and political mentor Roy Cohn. Cohn was a longtime darling of the far right --he had served as Joseph McCarthy's lead council during his communist witch hunts in the 1950s. During this time he also developed an intense hatred for the Kennedy family.

By the early 1960s Cohn was close to the mob and reportedly a member of Permindex, an organization long linked to the JFK assassination. Not long afterwards he would also become the New York City attorney for Greek shipping magnet Aristotle Onassis, who is alleged to have put up the money for RFK's assassination.


Big Ed and the Gray Ghost

While Cohn was first introduced the conspiratorial lexicon around 1970 thanks to the references to him in the controversial "Torbitt document," it wasn't until the early 1990s that rumors began to emerge concerning the incredible lengths to which his relationship with the US intelligence community went. Amusingly, these allegations were started by a former CIA officer who had participated in the highly controversial Phoenix Program.

I am of course referring to former Nebraska state senator John DeCamp, who claimed:
"... According to the former head of the vice squad for one of America's biggest cities, 'Cohn's job was to run the little boys. Say you had an admiral, a general, a congressman, who did not want to go along with the program. Cohn's job was to set them up, then they would go along. Cohn told me that himself.' "
(The Frankln Cover-Up, John DeCamp, pg. 179)
As I've noted over the years, I'm not a huge fan of DeCamp's and corroboration for his claims in this regard is mixed at best. DeCamp also alleges that one of Cohn's key collaborators in this work was infamous DC lobbyist and public relations guru Robert Keith Gray. To establish Gray's bonafides as a honey trap specialist for the CIA, DeCamp repeats claims initially made by the great Jim Hougan that disgraced CIA veteran Edwin Wilson (addressed before here) was running sexual blackmail operations out of a certain D.C.-based club Gray was an early president and frequent guest of beginning in the late 1960s. Here is the relevant passage from Hougan's classic Secret Agenda, which DeCamp also quotes at length:
"According to fugitive ex-CIA officer Frank Terpil, CIA-directed sexual blackmailing operations were intensive in Washington about the time of the Watergate scandal. One of those operations, Terpil claims, was run by his former partner, Ed Wilson. Wilson's base of operations for arranging trysts for the politically powerful was, Terpil says, Korean agent Tong Sun Park's George Town Club..."
(Secret Agenda, Jim Hougan, pg. 120)
"Big" Ed Wilson
The problem with these allegations is that Terpil is, as far as this researcher can determine, the only individual to have ever made these claims. Wilson himself denied them, as have various other former US intelligence officers who have addressed Wilson's misadventures. Wilson did however know Gray, and used the lobbyist as a director for the board of a front company Wilson had set up for the US intelligence community known as Consultants International. But while the two men eventually became partners of a sort, Wilson alleges that he originally approached Gray on behalf of the CIA to determine what exactly was going on at the George Town Club.
"Wilson's immediate motive for meeting Gray was to discover the relationship between Gray and a young Korean named Tongsun Park who first came to the United States in 1956 to attend Georgetown University. Park subsequently dropped out of college, but for a college drop-out he was rubbing elbows with some of the biggest names in Washington society, thanks largely to introductions from Gray. Park came from a family with long ties to Korean intelligence, and American oil companies that did business in Korea.
"By 1965 the CIA became interested in young Park because, with Gray's help, he had formed a new, exclusive social club named The George Town Club after its location. Park had been working on organizing the club for years. He was loading his new social club with founders, members, and management with ties to U.S. intelligence. Park put up the money and, with introductions from Gray and others, recruited founders for the club like the late Marine General Graves B. Erskine, who had an active intelligence career. Anna Chennault, the powerful advocate in America for Nationalist China, became a force in the club. Others followed, and most, like Gray, had the same conservative political outlook, connections to the intelligence world, or 'congressional overtones.' "
(The Power House, Susan B. Trento, pgs. 97-98)
Tongsun Park
Tongsun Park was later revealed to be an agent for the Korean Central Intelligence Agency (KCIA) while Anna Chennault was the longtime figure head of the powerful "China Lobby," the US front for the opium-sponsored regime of Chiang Kai-shek in Taiwan. The KCIA and the China Lobby were key players in establishing the Asian Peoples' Anti-Communist League (APACL), which eventually became a part of the broader World Anti-Communist League (WACL), which was addressed at length here. The WACL was more or less the visible face of the Fascist International for many decades. Compromised of various drug and arms traffickers, dictators and the inevitable "former" Nazi war criminals and US intelligence officers, the WACL became a powerful private intelligence network with an international reach by the 1970s.

It is interesting to note than many of the individuals and organizations linked to the Company in the second installment of this series such as Robert K. Brown, Mitchell WerBell III and the Medellin Cartel, had extensive ties to the WACL as well. The links between the Medellin Cartel and the WACL, noted before here, are especially interesting and relevant to the series, as shall be revealed in a future installment. But moving along.

The George Town Club appears then to have been a front for this network, especially the APACL associates and their American backers. This researcher tends to believe Wilson's claims that he was dispatched by the CIA to keep tabs on what was going on at the George Town Club as factions of the US intelligence community and Overworld were becoming quite disillusioned with the China Lobby at the time.

Let us now return to DeCamp's allegations, which essentially were that Robert Keith Gray was involved in sexual blackmail operations and that he was a protege of Roy Cohn's. As to the former, there are some indications that Gray may have had dealings in a certain honey trap operation by the 1980s (more on that in a moment), but evidence for such things happening at the George Town Club is quite scarce. While there can be little doubt that the club was used to influence American politicians, as far as this researcher can tell, this was accomplished through good old fashioned bribes, not trysts.

The George Town Club
The closet thing I could find to a honey trap involved another KCIA agent known as Suzi Thompson. Thompson and the activities of the George Town Club came to light in the late 1970s with the scandal often referred to as Koreagate in which several KCIA assets were investigated by Congress for their influence pedaling. Tongsun Park's activities at George Town were exposed during this process. It also came to light that fellow KCIA asset Suzi Thompson was sleeping with a Democratic member of the House of Representatives during this time, but it does not appear that Thompson was especially active in the George Town Club. She was a Congressional staffer and the affair appears to have developed out of this connection and not George Town.

Several years after the George Town/Koreagate scandal had subsided, Gray was implicated in a D.C.-based prostitution ring with deep implications.
"In June 1982, the FBI began investigating allegations made by a male congressional page (a high school student working for the Congress, usually as a messenger) that he had been solicited by a congressman, and that several of his fellow pages had told him about sexual activities with members of Congress. A couple weeks later, on July 1, Congressman Louis Stokes, the chairman of the House of Representatives Committee on Standards of Official Conduct, known as the Ethics Committee, announced that the Committee was joining the FBI and local law enforcement in their investigations. Stokes said the Ethics Committee would widen the scope of the investigation to include a range of alleged irregularities on Capitol Hill including sexual relations between pages and congressmen and charges that a cocaine and marijuana ring operated in Congress and used pages and congressional employees as couriers... 
"Gray's name first surfaced as the result of an anonymous tip to the House Ethics Committee accusing Gray of using drugs and sexual activity to lobby Congressman..."
(The Power House, Susan Trento, pg. 176)
Gray was accused of being in league with a D.C.-based male prostitution ring being run by a former Justice Department official then working as a consultant to Congress and a photographer who ran a local photoshop. Nothing ultimately came of these allegations, though certainly the investigation was not helped by the fact that several of the private detectives being used by Congress were also working for Gray at the same time. But moving along.

Robert Keith Gray
As to Gray's relationship with Roy Cohn, this is also rather ambiguous. Extensive Google sleuthing turned up no ties between the two men except for DeCamp's claims. It was only after I picked up a copy of The Power House, Susan Trento's excellent biography of Gray, that I determined that the two men did know one another and had some type of relationship, though it is unknown as to how close they actually were.

Certainly it is tempting to speculate that their relationship was much closer than what is publicly known. Both men first rose to prominence in D.C. during the 1950s, though Cohn's time there was winding down by 1956 when Gray first made the scene. Both men traveled in the same circles and appear to have been especially close to a certain CIA director whom shall be addressed in a moment. And both men were gay Republicans in era when such things were kept deep in the closet. But when all is said and done, there does not appear to be any definitive evidence concerning the extent of their relationship, only that they traveled in the same social circles and knew one another. It is interesting to note, however, that Tom Fortuin, Gray's attorney during the prostitution ring allegations, hailed from New York City and was apparently a good friend of Cohn's.

Before leaving this topic there are two interesting points worth making. One was the suspected ties between the Company and the arms smuggling operation of Ed Wilson in Libya.
"Defense and Treasury Department investigators intensified their probe of the China Lake thefts, searching for links to ex-spies Wilson and Terpil. Like the Bryants, Wilson and Terpil had recruited China Lake employees to build bombs destined for Libya, and had sponsored repeated thefts from China Lake. Larry Barcella, assistant U.S. attorney in Washington, D.C., was on the brink of seeking a federal indictment for Wilson and Terpil for their role in supplying weapons and terrorist training to Qaddafi. Interviewed by ATF agents about the matter, Barcella said he had no evidence a connection existed between the Wilson/Terpil network and Bradley Bryant. Although there was a great deal of suspicion that some of the items Bradley Bryant had in his possession in Philadelphia were bound for Libya, coupled with the insistence by the Philadelphia police that Terpil had visited Bryant at the Sheraton prior to Bryant's arrest, Barcella was unable to prove that a relationship existed."
(The Bluegrass Conspiracy, Sally Denton, pg. 129)
Denton indicates, however, that many law enforcement personnel believed that a connection existed. Certainly there were more than a few similarities between the operations being overseen by Wilson, especially there emphasis on gunrunning and the use of "former" US military personnel to assist in these activities. For more information on the Company's use of mercenaries and their thefts from China Lake, check the second installment.

The other point worth mentioning is a certain woman who played a crucial role in Gray's rise to prominence in D.C. during the 1950s: socialite and heiress Marjorie Merriweather Post. Post inherited the General Foods corporation from her father at age 27 and by the early twentieth century was reportedly the richest woman in the United States. Gray was a regular attendee at her D.C.-based parties in the 1950s and she seems to have played a key role in introducing him to a clique of powerful, rightward leaning women such as Anna Chennault and Clare Booth Luce who would remain key backer of Gray's for decades.

the legendary Mrs. Post
By the late 1960s Post had reportedly become a regular at the George Town Club.
"... Wilson recalled that Gray and Park entertained most of Washington society at The George Town Club, including the late Marjorie Merriweather Post. Gray would arrange to invite senators and congressmen down to Mara Largo, her vast Palm Beach mansion. Ed Wilson said he sometimes went on these trips. 'Mrs. Post used to come in quite a bit because Gray was very close to Mrs. Post. When she went down to Florida to her big mansion down there, he [Gray] used to fly senators and stuff down there and they had contact. I don't think it was business, just social. I used to see her all the time down there.' "
(The Power House, Susan Trento, pg. 101)
Yes dear reader, the Mar-a-Lago mentioned above is the same Florida mansion that the Orange One is presently using as the White House South. By the time Trump purchased it in 1985, Post had been dead since 1973. At the time of Post's death, the mansion had been willed to the United States Department of the Interior as a national landmark and a possible presidential retreat.

But throughout the 1970s Congressman Paul G. Rogers urged that the estate should be returned to the Post Foundation, a trust Post had established to manage her estate. Curiously, Rogers was the brother of Doyle Rogers, Post's longtime attorney who was tasked with managing her estate via the Post Foundation. When Mar-a-Lago was returned to Post Foundation in 1980, Doyle became the one tasked with selling the mansion.

Doyle eventually agreed to sell Mar-a-Lago to Trump in 1985, after the Orange One had been making bids on it since 1983. Reportedly a more lucrative offer was on the table from an interest based out of Houston at the time, but Doyle Rogers opted to sell the propriety to Trump anyway. Shortly thereafter he became Trump's Palm Beach attorney and frequented represented the Orange against complaints emanating from his use of Mar-a-Lago.

Mar-a-Lago
Post appears to have been very active in the same ring wing circles as Gray and Roy Cohn, and as such, it is most interest that Trump was the one to end up with Mar-a-Lago and is now using it as a presidential retreat, as Mrs. Post had originally envisioned. Did some one in the same circles that Gray, Cohn and Post traveled in intercede on Trump's behalf to close the deal in his favor while a better offer was on the table? Gray would certainly be an obvious candidate, though I've been unable to turn up any relationship with the famed lobbyist and Trump nor can I determine if Cohn had some type of relationship with the Post family. But nonetheless, this whole circle is a little to incestuous to be mere chance. But moving along.


Bill and the Boys

Can we then dismiss DeCamp's claims that Cohn was some type of sexual blackmail specialist out of hand? It is tempting, considering how problematic some of his allegations are concerning Robert Keith Gray, but as I kept digging into Cohn's activities, I turned up far more compelling evidence of such things. One of the most curious omissions from DeCamp's work is the known relationship between Roy Cohn and another notorious D.C.-based lobbyist named Craig Spence.

Spence originally began his professional career as a journalist, serving as ABC's Vietnam correspondent during the war's height in the late 1970s. He then left ABC and Vietnam in 1970 and relocated to Japan. There he developed contacts with the aristocratic Shiina family, who were very prominent in the Japanese Liberal Democratic Party, which has almost exclusively ruled Japan since the end of World War II. As was noted before here, the Liberal Democratic Party was very close to both the Yakuza and the old Asian People's Anti-Communist League clique noted above.

Spence used his ties with the Shiina family to establish himself as a powerful Republican lobbyist in the D.C. area by the early 1980s. It was the Shiina family that provided Spence with the money he used to procure his home in D.C.'s Kalorama area, which reportedly was used to entrap various VIPs in the city. Spence ran up a nearly $20,000-a month tab with a local homosexual escort service to provide entertainment at his famed parties there in addition to providing ample amounts of cocaine. More than a few guests believed that the drug-fueled sexual escapades were being recorded by an elaborate surveillance system Spence had throughout the house.
"... the Washington Times expanded considerable amounts of ink fleshing out Spence's blackmail enterprise: A Washington Times article from June 1989, 'Power Broker Served Drugs, Sex at Parties Bugged for Blackmail,' revealed the strange goings-on at Spence's DC home: 'Several former associate said his house on Wyoming Avenue was bugged and had a secret two-way mirror, and that he attempted to ensnare visitors into compromising sexual encounters that he could then uses leverage.'
"According to interviews conducted by Washington Times reporters, Spence had an eight-foot-long, two-way mirror overlooking his library they gave him a prime vantage point for 'spying on guests.' Bugs were also scattered throughout various nooks and crannies within his house... 
"A former Reagan administration official who worked at the US Information Agency attended soirees at Spence's home, and he disclosed to Washington Times reporters that he personally observed a cornucopia of recording and taping equipment. 'It was my clear impression that the house was bugged,' he said. An Air Force sergeant whom Spence employed as a bodyguard corroborated accounts of blackmail: 'The house was definitely bugged. I can't say what he was doing with the information. I don't know that. But he was recording whatever occurred there.' "
(The Franklin Scandal, Nick Bryant, pgs. 301-302)
Craig J. Spence
Later, it was alleged that Spence had even provided midnight guided tours of the White House for several of the escorts in his employment. Unsurprisingly, Spence claimed ties to the CIA and darkly hinted at Agency approval for what appears to have been a major blackmail operation.

Spence has also been fingered as an associate of former Nebraska state representative Larry E. King by numerous eyewitnesses. King was the head of the now defunct Franklin Community Federal Credit Union in Omaha, Nebraska. Franklin collapsed in 1988 as part of the unfolding savings and loan crisis of the late 1980s. As investigators began to take a look at King and Franklin, allegations began to emerge that King was a leading figure in a nationwide pedophile ring that recruited children from the Omaha area. Several of these kids would go on to allege encounters with Spence via King.

Henry Vinson, the so-called "D.C. Madam" who provided many of the male escorts for Spence's parties, also alleged to have seen King and Spence together and to have overheard them speaking of a pedophile ring they were both involved in. He also alleged that Spence repeatedly pushed him to procure underage boys for his parties, which Vinson refused to do.

The allegations concerning King, often referred to as the "Franklin scandal," remain highly controversial. Charges against King involving pedophilia were thrown out years ago, but several of his reputed underage prostitutes managed to successfully sue King in the late 1990s and numerous witnesses have come forward over the years to corroborate the claims against him. As such, many astute researchers consider Franklin to be a cover-up of epic proportions. And at the heart of it was Spence, who appears to have been the key figure for this ring in Washington D.C.

Larry E. King
And it would seem that Spence was close to Roy Cohn as well.
"... Spence's soirees also attracted high-ranking military and intelligence officials. In fact, CIA Director William Casey seemed to be particularly fond of Spence and his high-flying get-togethers. Spence once threw a glitzy birthday bash for his friend and right-wing closet homosexual Roy Cohn, and his friend William Casey was one of the guests of honor. Larry King, as you will recall, discussed his friendship with William Casey in an article in Omaha's Metropolitan."
(The Franklin Scandal, Nick Bryant, pg. 296) 
Thus, Cohn was not only friendly with Spence, but the infamous Bill Casey would attend a birthday bash for Cohn as a guest of honor. As was noted in the prior installment, Cohn was instrumental in setting up media mogul Rupert Murdoch as a propagandist for the CIA during the Reagan years. Casey was the CIA director during this time and personally participated in the talks to sponsor Murdoch, along with US Information Agency director Charles Wick, a friend of Gray's. It is likely Cohn used his relationship with Casey to make these arrangements.

Casey is surely one of the most controversial CIA directors of all time, playing a key role in Iran-Contra. But beyond that, Casey appears to have been a leading figure in both the Fascist International and pedophile rings linked to it, as was noted before here.

William Casey
Casey was also very close to Gray and had been a member of the George Town Club since at least the early 1970s, when his relationship with Gray appears to have begun. According to DeCamp, Gray was also very close to Omaha World-Heraldpublisher Harold Andersen, reportedly a key figure in the Franklin pedophile ring, but I have been unable to confirm any of this. Still Gray, who hailed from Nebraska, took frequent trips back to the state throughout his adult life, nominally to keep in touch with his family. These trips continued throughout the Franklin era.

But let us return to Cohn. It would appear that the man potentially had ties to two individuals, fellow Republican homosexuals, who were engaged in honey trapping. In the case of Craig Spence, there can be little doubt that he was involved in some type of sexual blackmail. The evidence is far more circumstantial for Gray, but allegations have dogged him for years and he was apparently quite notorious among D.C. vice officers.

There are also indications that Spence and Gray were involved in the long alleged Franklin pedophile ring managed by Larry King. The evidence for Spence is far more compelling. In point of fact, there isn't especially credible evidence linking Gray to it other than his connections and his frequent trips to Nebraska. Still, both men were close to Bill Casey, who appears to be plugged into a broader international pedophile network. And Cohn had relationships with all three men, being especially close to Casey and Spence and potentially providing Gray with an attorney when he was implicated in a vice ring.

Roy Cohn
Before wrapping up, it is worth mentioning again Cohn's alleged membership in Permindex, the notorious trade organization originally headquartered in Basel, Switzerland that has long been linked to the Kennedy assassination. Its linkage to the Kennedy assassination in turn is largely based upon the membership of New Orleans businessman and alleged CIA asset Clay Shaw had in the organization. Shaw was famously indicted by New Orleans attorney Jim Garrison for his role in the Kennedy assassination during the late 1960s.

Shaw, like Cohn, Gray and Spence, was a Republican closet homosexual. Over the course of Garrison's investigation, Shaw was repeatedly linked to the curious figure of David Ferrie. Ferrie worked with Lee Harvey Oswald out of the office of New Orleans private detective Guy Banister during the summer of 1963. Both Banister and Ferrie were linked to a host of far right wing organizations (as was noted before here) many of them tied to the same anti-Castro network I linked the Company to in the second installment of this series.

But beyond that, Ferrie was also linked extensively to the Syndicate and, more ominously, an interstate prostitute ring that was essentially a gloried form of sexual slavery (noted before here). Most disturbing of all, however, is the fact that Ferrie was an arch pedophile who may have molested dozens of kids in the New Orleans area. As noted before here, there are some indications that Shaw and Ferrie were both involved in an especially sadistic pedophile ring in New Orleans. What's more, Shaw had ties to the same international network that Casey was a part of, as I noted before here.

Clay Shaw
Another alleged member of Permindex was Licio Gelli, the notorious Grand Master of Italy's Propaganda Due (P2) Masonic Lodge (noted before here). P2, which was linked to a host of outrageous in Italy, including various assassinations and terrorism, has been repeatedly described as a state within a state. Compromised largely of high ranking figures in the Vatican and the Italian political and business communities (to say nothing of the military and intelligence agencies), P2 served as something of a shadow government for Italy throughout the 1970s and early 1980s. This blog has considered the lodge in depth before here.

P2 and Gelli derived much of their power from a collection of files Gelli kept with comprising material on numerous figures that he used for blackmail purposes. Whether or not these files contained sexual material is unknown, but would hardly be surprising. The respective operations of Cohn, Shaw and Gelli all seem to follow a similar modus operandi.

And be assured, Spence and Gray were hardly the extent of Cohn's ties to sexual blackmail. In fact, one of his proteges appears to have spent decades springing various honey traps across the globe. He shall be considered in the next installment. Stay tuned dear reader.



Goodfellas Part V: The Bedroom Dick

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Welcome to the fifth installment in what began as a series examining the ties between President Donald J. Trump (aka the Orange One) and organized crime. Since then the series has taken on a life of its own, covering a host of scandals and shadowy figures that constitute the hidden history of the United States following the end of the Second World War. For those of you just joining us, I'll try my best to recap what has been previously examined.

This series grew out of a prior blog I had written in October of 2017 considering Trump's brief tenure as CEO of the gaming interest known as Resorts International. Resorts originated in the early 1960s as a company known as the Mary Carter Paint Company, which was widely believed to be a CIA front involved in anti-Castro operations in Florida during the Bay of Pigs era. By the end of the decade, Mary Carter had been rechristened Resorts International and had gotten into the casino industry. It established the first casino in the Bahamas at Paradise Island, which cemented its place as one the premier gaming destinations in the world.

From the get-go Resorts' contacts were impeccable. Overworld figures like President Richard M. Nixon and reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes were regular guests. At the other end of spectrum, various associates of Meyer Lanksy were directly employed by the Resorts casino on Paradise Island while stockholders included Richard Mellon Hitchcock, who at one point was the banker for the largest LSD smuggling syndicate in the world, and other clients of Castle Bank & Trust, a notorious CIA front that specialized in laundering money generated from drug and arms trafficking.

Meyer Lansky, a looming presence in this series
Most curious of all was a subsidiary of Resorts known as Intertel. Intertel, with a staff comprised largely of "former" US intelligence agents, was a private intelligence agency that first gained notoriety in 1970 for its "rescue" of Howard Hughes from one of his Las Vegas casinos. Intertel would continue to provide security for Hughes up until the time of his death in 1976. During this timeframe Hughes was rarely seen in the flesh outside of Intertel agents, which has led more than a few researcher to wonder if Intertel had in fact stealthy taken over his vast business empire.

Intertel was a still a part of Resorts when Trump briefly became its CEO in 1986. Resorts had played a key role in opening up Atlantic City to legalized gambling and Trump had nominally wanted to acquire more casinos in the city. Eventually Trump was bought out by Merv Griffin, but maintained possession of what was supposed to be Resorts' crown jewel, the Taj Mahal.

While Resorts is often depicted as a minor episode in Trump's business career, it likely announced his arrival as a major player in certain circles as Resorts had longstanding ties to both organized crime and the US intelligence community. Indeed, it seems especially ominous in light of ties Trump had been cultivating for nearly a decade leading up to his bid to take over Resorts.

As was noted in the first installment of this series, it appears that Trump had forged close ties to organized crime elements by at least the beginning of the 1980s and that by the middle of the decade his flagship, Trump Tower, was being used as a vast center of money laundering by said elements. As I was wrapping up that installment, I noted one of his early backers was the mysterious Edward "Biff" Halloran, a reputed member of the Genovese crime family (the same family Meyer Lansky had long collaborated with) who disappeared in 1996.

Trump Tower
With the second installment, I considered a curious former business partner of Halloran's, namely Kentuckian Bradley Bryant. By the late 1970s Bryant, with the aid of fellow Kentuckian Andrew "Drew" Thornton, had established an elaborate, nationwide drugs and arm trafficking network known as "the Company." They recruited heavily among former US military personnel via Soldier of Fortunemagazine, which was run by former Green Beret Robert K. Brown. Brown was himself heavily involved in the Bay of Pigs and related anti-Castro operations and would later play a role in the supply network for Iran-Contra.

During the third installment, I noted other ties Trump had to the Company, most notably former Kentucky Governor John Y. Brown, who set up shop in Trump Tower after losing his reelection bid in 1983 (thanks in no small part to allegations concerning his ties to the Company) just as the Tower was becoming a major center of money laundering. Previously Brown was alleged to have been a silent owner of Caesars Palace in Las Vegas, which the Company used to launder money and which Trump was a frequent guest of in the late 1970s.

As I wrapped up that installment, I began to consider the figure who likely initiated Trump into this netherworld: his longtime attorney and political mentor Roy Cohn. Cohn had first risen to prominence during the 1950s when he served as Joseph McCarthy's lead attorney in his Communist witch hunts. During this time Cohn became a bitter foe of the Kennedy family as well. Later, he was reputed to be a member of Permindex, a shadowy international trade organization originally based in Basel, Switzerland that has long been linked to the JFK assassination. Cohn would also become the attorney for Greek shipping magnet Aristotle Onassis, who has been accused of putting up the money for RFK's assassination.

Roy Cohn
With the fourth installment I began to consider the longstanding allegations that Cohn was a key figure in a nationwide pedophile ring. His links to Robert Keith Gray and Craig Spence were considered, as was the broader ties all three men had to the Franklin scandal, as well as their relationship to infamous CIA Director William Casey. Casey was himself a part of a broader international network of far right figures linked to pedophile networks geared towards compromising Western governments. The European branch of this network is known as Le Cercle (noted before here) while the broader international front was for years the World Anti-Communist League (WACL, addressed at length before here).

Cohn himself had impeccable links to this network via its American branch, which for many years was fronted by the American Security Council network (ASC, noted before here). Links between the Trump administration and the old ASC network have already been addressed before here and here. Cohn himself was involved in the more extreme offshoots of the ASC, such as the John Birch Society and the Western Goals Foundation, a private intelligence network launched by the ASC and JBS during the early 1980s. Cohn briefly served as Western Goals' director. A member of Western Goals' advisory board during this time was General John Singlaub, who was also the chairman of the WACL and Robert K. Brown's old boss during Vietnam. As was noted in part two of this series, General Singlaub would later use Brown in his efforts to set up supply lines as part of Iran-Contra.

But in addition to Cohn's extensive ties to the international right (or Fascist International, if one prefers) there is ample evidence that Cohn and his acolytes were involved in honey trapping decades before the Franklin scandal was exposed and many of them remained active in such practices years after Cohn's death. A likely instance of this was the prostitute scandal that brought down New York Governor Eliot Spitzer in 2008.

Eliot Spitzer
The man who outed Spitzer? None other than Cohn's longtime friend and protege, Roger Stone. Yes, the same Roger Stone who would play in key role in Trump's conquest of the White House. Stone had been hired in 2007 by New York state Republicans close to Wall Street to take down Spitzer after he had launched corruption probes against said monied interests. At one point Stone even made a threatening phone call to Spitzer's father. Stone alleged to have found out about Spitzer's involvement in a prostitution ring via a Miami-based friend of his involved in the "sex industry."

But Stone's activities against Spitzer are child's play compared to the decades-spanning activites of a certain international man of mystery.


Corbally: The Early Years

His name was Thomas "Tom" Corbally and nominally he had worked for many years as a private detective. Corbally's family had been involved in detective work since the 1920s, when his grandfather (also named Thomas) had founded the Corbally Detective Agency in Newark, New Jersey. Corbally's father and uncles all worked for Agency and Tom himself was working over 30 hours a week there before he was 18. 

The Corbally family also had extensive ties to organized crime by this time as well. Corbally had been kidnapped as a child and the Corbally's had looked to members of what is now referred to as Genovese crime family to arrange for his safe return. We've already encountered the Genovese family extensively throughout this series. As noted above, Biff Halloran was believed to be made member of the Genovese family while Meyer Lansky had a decades-spanning association with them. 

Unsurprisingly, it would seem that Corbally had ties to some intelligence organization by the onset of WWII as well. Initially, his contacts appear to have been with the British:
"Before Pearl Harbor, America First isolationists were determined to keep the United States out of the raging European war, making any recruitment effort politically sensitive. Corbally, determined to get in the fight, made contact with the Clayton Knight Committee — an unsanctioned operation designed by the Canadian government to bring willing Americans north even as the US government maintained strict official neutrality in the war. Very few people knew the Clayton Knight Committee had its unadvertised headquarters right in the lavish surroundings of the Waldorf Astoria on New York’s Park Avenue."
the Waldorf Astoria, which will appear again in this ssaga
During this time frame, the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York appears to been one of the key meeting places for the Pilgrim's Society, the absolute pinnacle of the Anglo-American establishment.  We shall return to such circles in just a moment, so do keep it in mind.

Corbally did some time with the Royal Canadian Air Force during the early 1940s, but eventually washed out, alleged due to his insubordination (which was quite a feat during an era when Western governments were trying to get their hands on all able-bodied men they could find). Eventually, he turned up again in Germany at the end of the war, apparently working for some branch of the US intelligence community:
"He popped up in Germany, where he served as a civilian with the US military occupation until at least June 1949. Officially, Corbally was attached to the Combined Travel Board, which helped determine who could and could not come in and out of Germany after the war.
"On one document, Corbally wrote that his title in Germany was 'chief clerk.' Intriguingly, he also wrote that a military regulation 'precludes a description of several classified phrases [sic] of my employment' with the occupation government. He continued, 'However, I feel that the experience gained by my working with [US Army Counterintelligence Corps] and the War Department Detachment in Germany is worthy of note.'
"In that sentence, Corbally left an enormous clue about his true role in Germany. The 'War Department Detachment' sounds like some bland bureaucratic entity — but a historian at the US Army Center of Military History tells me that it was in fact the cover name used by the CIA in postwar Germany. 
"It’s difficult to tease out of the limited written record what Corbally’s missions actually were. But a once-classified memo on the CIA website shows that the War Department Detachment was tasked with securing 'all available data which you may obtain on political, economic, and sociological developments in other zones of occupied Germany.' The entity had license to roam far outside its borders, including Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Austria...
"The War Department Detachment identified and tracked down top German officials after the war and came in contact with some of the most murderous Nazis, including the infamous Nikolaus 'Klaus' Barbie — an SS and Gestapo officer known as 'the Butcher of Lyon' for his torture of French prisoners. The Detachment would eventually develop a relationship with Barbie after the war as it recruited German allies to help subvert the growing communist presence in Soviet-controlled East Germany. For his help, US intelligence officials later helped Barbie escape to South America — where he would live undetected until the 1970s."

The War Department Detachment was in fact a front for the Central Intelligence Group, the precursor to the CIA. Corbally's work with the Army's Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC) is also interesting. While little remarked upon now, the CIC was an extremely powerful organization in the postwar years and took the lead role in Germany initially of establishing the so-called "Ratlines" there. They also appear to have been involved in setting up the earliest efforts to create "stay-behind armies," which eventually became a part of what is commonly referred to as Operation Gladio (Gladio was in fact only the name of the Italian branch).

In theory, Gladio and related networks were established in Western Europe by the Pentagon and CIA to wage guerrilla war against the Soviet Union in the event of the invasion. In actuality, considerable evidence has emerged over the years that these networks were engaged in terror campaigns in NATO nations to ensure that said nations remained vassals of the United States during the Cold War. Frequently these networks recruited heavily among "former" fascists and Nazis, who in turn engaged in what is often referred to as a "strategy of tension." In many instances, fascists infiltrated left wing and communist organizations and used them to carry out terror campaigns that were then linked to the Soviet Union by equally compromised intelligence services in NATO nations. Much more information on how these networks functioned can be found in my series concerning the infamous Propaganda Due Masonic lodge whose grand master, Licio Gelli, was linked to Permindex along with Roy Cohn (noted in part three of this series).

The above-mentioned Klaus Barbie was a key part of the initial efforts to establish the German component of the "stay behind" networks.
"The U.S. Army's General Staff Top Secret March 28, 1949 Overall Strategic Concepts highlighted that Germany 'has an excellent potential of trained men for both underground and Secret Army Reserves [stay-behind units]. Effective resistance can and should be organized.' On the orders of the Pentagon in Washington the newly created US Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC) tracked down German Nazis and brought them to the Nurnberg trials, while the CIC also secretly recruited selected right-wing extremist for the anti-Communist army. This practice of the Pentagon was revealed only in 1986 when the US Department of Justice in a large press conference – which had maybe drawn the biggest crowd of journalists in Washington since the Watergate days – admitted that the CIC had recruited a high-ranking Nazi in the post-war years. Specifically a 600-page long study, compiled by Allan Ryan for the US Justice Department, confirmed that SS and Gestapo officer Klaus Barbie had been recruited by the CIC in 1947, had thereafter been hidden from the war crimes investigators and had then been spirited out of Europe to Argentina through a clandestine 'ratline' in 1951.
"Barbie was saved not because the United States secret service officers were impressed with his moral record, but because he was most useful in the setting up of the German stay-behind network. 'Among those who were recruited and did some recruiting for the scheme in the first years,' the British press reported during the Gladio revelations, 'were and ex-SS Obersturmfuhrer, Hans Otto, and other smaller fish. But the prize catch was Klaus Barbie who functioned as a recruiter for ex-Nazis and members of the fascist Bund Deutscher Jugend (BDJ).' Barbie, during the war known as the 'Butcher of Lyon,' had during his stay in the French town from 1943 to 1944 been responsible for the murder of at least 4,000 resistance workers and Jews, as well as the deportation of another 15,000 to concentration death camps. Barbie was condemned to death in absentia by a French court soon after the war for crimes against humanity as witnesses described him as a sadistic torturer, who terrified men, women and children with his whip and Alsatian dog."
(NATO's Secret Armies, Daniele Ganser, pg. 190)
Klaus Barbie
It should be emphasized that there is no evidence that Corbally ever met Barbie, or that he was involved in setting up early stay-behind networks, especially since he left the Army in 1949, just as these networks were first being put into place. Its interesting to note that some believed he left the Army under some distress. Reportedly, he briefly considered becoming a priest for some time after he left the service.


Kroll

His time with the CIC and War Department Detachment was almost surely not Corbally's last brush with the US intelligence community, however. In the early 1970s, he began a long association with the infamous Kroll and Associates who, along with similar outfits such as Wackenhut and Intertel, were at the forefront of the private intelligence revolution. Nominally Kroll is involved in corporate investigations and risk consultations, and as such has had a longstanding association with Wall Street. Kroll has also long been reputed to work as an arm of  both the US and British security services. It first gained infamy in that regard when its ties to 9/11 began to emerge.
"... After the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, Kroll acquired the contract from the Port Authority of New York to upgrade security at the World Trade Center, in the process beating out two other firms. Kroll continued with the WTC security contract through the period leading up to the September 11 attacks. One of Kroll's directors, Jerome Hauer, also managed New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's Office of Emergency Management, which was located on the 23rd floor of WTC-7, which was also destroyed on September 11. Kroll's contract gave it unfettered access to all the buildings destroyed in New York on 9/11."
(Black 9/11, Mark H. Gaffney, pgs. 31-32)
Curiously, the above-mentioned Jerome Hauer was also who hired former FBI counter-terrorism expert John P. O'Neill to oversee security at the World Trade Center. O'Neill, who died in the WTC on 9/11, had previously spent years tracking Osama bin Laden for the FBI and is at the center of many conspiracy theories surrounding 911.

John P. O'Neill
It is also interesting to note that at the time of 9/11, Kroll was partially owned by the American International Group, better known as AIG. AIG had longstanding ties to the US intelligence community going back to its founder, Cornelius Vander Starr, who worked for the OSS during WWII and who opened up his company to the CIA for years afterwards. This relationship was carried on by Vander Starr's handpicked successor, Maurice Greenberg, who was AIG's chairman and CEO at the time of 9/11 Greenberg had been a close friend of William Casey, who we dealt with at length in the prior installment. At one point Casey had tried to recruit Greenberg to be his deputy director at the CIA during the Reagan years.

Greenberg was ultimately forced out of AIG in 2005 in the midst of various fraud investigations being conducted by the Securities and Exchange Commission, the US Justice Department and the New York Attorney General's Office. And the New York Attorney General who went after Greenberg? None other than Eliot Spitzer, who brought various civil complaints against Greenberg. Spitzer would go on to be elected New York Governor in 2006 and was taken out in 2008 by Roger Stone, as was noted above. While Greenberg's downfall was surely not the only reason why Spitzer was removed from office, Greenberg was an Old Boy par excellence and surely his downfall ruffled a few feathers.

Maurice Greenberg
But back to the matter at hand, namely Thomas Corbally. Corbally appears to have left Kroll around the time of 9/11, thus it is unlikely he played a role though he reportedly remained well informed up to the time of his death in 2004. Regardless, it seems likely Corbally helped initiate Kroll into the US deep state. He was reportedly responsible for some of their more unsavory international connections:
"Corbally introduced Kroll operatives to French Resistance and intelligence veterans in Paris, and explained how the Vatican Bank was used by the mafia to launder money in Italy. One time, he set up a seemingly promising meeting with an aristocratic British judge at the fabulous Peninsula Hotel in Hong Kong, with its rows of gleaming Rolls-Royces lining the driveway — only for the poor Kroll investigator to find out that what the posh judge really wanted was a Newark-style bribe."
But when not moonlighting for Kroll, Corbally appears to have been up to some incredible intrigues.


Cohn and Honey Trapping

Corbally first met Roy Cohn at some point during the 1950s and soon fell under his spell. Cohn would go on to have an enormous influence on Corbally:
"Cohn’s law practice, and its seemingly never-ending flow of corporate conflicts, political intrigue, and society maneuvering, provided a steady stream of investigative work for... Corbally. And it was through Cohn that Corbally later met and socialized with future president Donald Trump, who, like Corbally, enjoyed being around beautiful women."
Trump was also mentioned as a contact of Corbally's back in his 2004 obituary. It would seem that Corbally had a longstanding relationship to the Orange One stemming from Roy Cohn and that likely laid the basis for Trump's rise to the presidency. For you see, it would appear that Corbally was Cohn's chief sexual blackmail specialist.

This aspect of Corbally's career has occasionally bubbled to the surface over the years, most recently in the early 1990s. It was then that the scandal of the "Hollywood Madam," Heidi Fleiss, was making the rounds. In 1993 Fleiss had first been charged with pandering and rumors soon began to emerge that she provided services for many of Hollywood's leading stars and studio executives. As Fleiss' legal woes mounted, Corbally was there for her:
"Over the course of their relationship, Corbally would become a client and confidant of the 'Hollywood Madam,' who ran an escort service for the rich and famous. Later, when Corbally found out Fleiss was snorting crystal meth, he told her to stop — and he set an example with his own sober lifestyle. And after her 1993 arrest for pandering, pimping, and narcotics possession, Corbally gave her tens of thousands of dollars in cash to help Fleiss pay her mounting legal bills. When she was facing jail time, Fleiss turned to Corbally to concoct a desperate plan to flee the country. Corbally instead counseled her to stay and do whatever time she was sentenced to. After all, he said, she was still a young woman with plenty of time ahead of her. Better a few years in prison than a lifetime running from US law enforcement."
Heidi Fleiss
It would also appear that Corbally subtly threatened her to not name any of her clients:
"When she was at her most vulnerable — even contemplating suicide — Corbally came forward with much-needed cash to help Fleiss’s legal defense. One payment to her law firm was as much as $20,000. But it was delivered with a stern message: Heidi must not name names. Her wealthy, powerful clients had to be protected."
It seems to have worked, as only a few names had come out until recently. Curiously, one of the first names to have surfaced was that of famed producer Robert Evans. Evans had produced the Syndicate-glorifying Godfather as well Chinatown, a private detective movie starring Jack Nicholson and directed by convicted pedophile Roman Polanski. Evans and Polanski had previously collaborated together on the infamous Rosemary's Baby, which has been a lightening rod for a host of sinister and strange synchronicities over the years. And Polanski was of course married to Sharon Tate at the time of her murder at the hands of the Manson family.

Corbally had likely known Evans for several years prior to their mutual involvement with Fleiss. This connection will be most significant in a future installment, so do keep it in mind dear reader.

Robert Evans
Before moving along, it is also worth noting the sex scandals currently rocking Hollywood. Most notably, several prominent Democrats such as Harvey Weinstein and Kevin Spacey have been laid low by the #MeToo movement, no doubt to the delight of the Orange One. This researcher and no doubt many others have wondered if the sudden exposure of the infamous casting couch may have been driven at least in part by the leaking of control files by someone close to Trump.

As far as this researcher can tell, none of the celebs who have been outed as former clients of Fleiss' have turned up as arch offenders in the #MeToo fallout. That being said, a comprehensive list of Fleiss' clients has never been revealed. But beyond that, Corbally was apparently quite active in Hollywood for decades. He surely had encountered other sex rings over the years.

As we shall see, it seems that Corbally was keeping tabs on numerous VIP sex rings across the globe for years. With a figure like this active in Hollywood for many years, Trump may well have numerous smoking guns in his possession in regards to Tinseltown. It would be interesting to see how things play out as Hollywood becomes more combative towards the Orange One. Certainly anyone who encountered Corbally back in the day should think twice before throwing in with the "Resistance."


Cliveden

Of course, the fallout from Heidi Fleiss' arrest was hardly the first time Corbally's name had turned up in a high profile sex scandal. The first instance was linked to events that ultimately toppled the government in the UK and may even have involved a beloved American president. 

I am of course referring to the Profumo affair. As I'm sure many of my American readers only have a vague understanding of Profumo, here's a brief rundown: In 1961 John Profumo, the Secretary of State for War in the Conservative government of Harold Macmillan began an affair with a barely legal model named Christine Keeler. The affair was not revealed to the public at large until 1963, long after Profumo had ceased seeing Keeler.

John Profumo
What really made the affair scandalous was the fact Keeler had also been sleeping with Captain Yevgeny Ivanov, a Soviet naval attache, at the same time she was seeing Profumo. Ivanov was working on behalf on the GRU, the Soviet Union's military intelligence, during his time in the UK. This led to concerns that Keeler was being used by Ivanov to ply state secrets from Profumo.

Keeler was set up with both Profumo and Ivanov by a osteopath named Stephen Ward. Ward had ample connections in British high society and was known to supply barely legal girls to many of his aristocratic friends. It is also widely believed that Ward was working on behalf of MI5 (and possibly MI6 as well) when he set up Keeler with Ivanov. There are even allegations that British intelligence was attempting to use Ward's friendship with Ivanov as a kind of back channel to the Soviet Union during the Cuban missile crisis.

Stephen Ward
Ward's chief patron among the aristocracy was Lord William Waldorf Astor II, who may have also been his handler for some branch of British intelligence. Certainly Astor had extensive contacts among such circles.
"Astor had extensive involvement with intelligence, professionally and personally. As the naval intelligence representative to the 31 Committee, he had regular contact with MI5 and MI6 officers in the Middle East. Later, in London, he had continued to work in intelligence at the Admiralty. His first wife, Sarah, have been a translator at Bletchley, where Germany's Enigma code was broken. His second wife, Philippa, was the daughter of Lieutenant-Colonel Henry Hunloke, MI5's man in Jerusalem during the war."
(The Secret World of Stephen Ward, Anthony Summers & Stephen Dorril, pg. 77)
Beginning in the late 1950s, Astor began to rent out a cottage on his family's estate at Cliveden to Ward for use on the weekends. Ward in turn frequently brought young girls with him to Cliveden to entertain Lord Astor and other visiting aristocrats. These parties became quite notorious once the Profumo affair was exposed. It was at Cliveden that Profumo had first been introduced to Christine Keeler, after all.

It would seem that Lord Astor consented to these parties in part at the behest of British intelligence.
"MI6... was interested in Ward from the early 1950s. According to the agent who monitored Ward's activity, MI6 concluded, moreover that it sister service, MI5, used Lord Astor and his estate at Cliveden for 'honeytrap' operations – operations designed to entrap intelligence targets by compromising them sexually. Lord Astor, an MI6 officer said, was 'on friendly terms with senior members of MI5, and was happy to help him, and in his view the country, when asked to do so... When they needed to make use of Ward, to provide suitable women for visiting heads of state, they went through his friend Lord Astor.' "
(The Secret Life of Stephen Ward, Anthony Summers & Stephen Dorril, pg. 79)
Lord William Waldorf Astor II
At this point I need to pause and give the reader a little background on Lord Astor and his estate at Cliveden. As I'm sure many of you are aware, the Astor family is one of the most powerful in the history of both the US and UK. The patriarch is generally considered to be John Jacob Astor, the first American multimillionaire and one of the wealthiest men in history. Officially Astor made his money in the fur trade, but some of it in fact came from smuggling opium. As such, he's not only one of the richest men to ever live, but one of the most powerful drug dealers as well.

John Jacob Astor
Astor came to American shortly after the time of the Revolutionary War from Germany by way of England. He was born in Waldorf, now part of Germany, then a part of the Holy Roman Empire. Astor lived there until he was 16, at which point he left for London. He eventually settled in New York and for many decades afterwards his family would remain one of the most powerful in both the state and city that bares its name. Still, the family seems to have retained a fondness for their German heritage as many subsequent generations of Astors have used Waldorf in the names of their children (and at last one notable building). This is interesting in light of the Astor family's later support for a strong Germany. But more on that in a moment.

The British branch of the Astor family was established by John Jacob Astor III, a grandson of the first John Jacob, and the wealthiest Astor of his generation. While John Jacob III spent much of his life in these United States, he became increasingly fixated upon London in his later years. His son, William Waldorf Astor, became the first Lord Astor in 1899 after permanently moving to the UK in 1891.

The Astor family soon emerged at the absolute pinnacle of the Anglo-American Establishment. As such, they have long been one of the leading families in the Pilgrims Society. As was noted above, Thomas Corbally was originally recruited into British intelligence at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York City, which was long a meeting place of the Pilgrim in the US. And as I'm sure many of you have guessed by now, the Waldorf was built and long managed by the Astor family.

The Pilgrims Society is one of the most powerful elite societies in modern history, though it is little known among most conspiracy researchers, who continue to fixate upon one of its most notorious offshoots: the Round Table Group. As is well known by now, the Round Table Group served as the basis for the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), for many years the leading think tank for the Eastern Establishment in the United States, and its British counterpart, the Royal Institute for International Affairs.


Would the reader then be surprised to learn that the Astor family and their estate at Cliveden played a key role in establishing the Round Table network that the CFR grew out of? Consider:
"... the Round Table group, and came later to be called, somewhat inaccurately, the Cliveden Set, after the country estate of Lord and Lady Astor. It included Lord Milner, Leopold Amery, and Edward Grigg (Lord Altrincham), as well as Lord Lothian, Smuts, Lord Astor, Lord Brand (brother-in-law of Lady Astor and managing director of Lazard Brothers, the international bankers), Lionel Curtis, Geoffrey Dawson (editor of The Times), and their associates. This group wielded great influence because it controlled the Rhodes Trust, the Beit Trust, The Times of London, The Observer, the influential and highly anonymous quarterly review known as The Round Table (founded in 1910 with money supplied by Sir Abe Bailey and the Rhodes Trust, and with Lothian as editor), and it dominated the Royal Institute of International Affairs, called 'Chatham House' (of which Sir Abe Bailey and the Astors were the chief financial supporters, while Lionel Curtis was the actual founder), the Carnegie United Kingdom Trust, and All Souls College, Oxford. The Round Table group formed the core of the three-bloc-world supporters, and differed from the anti-Bolsheviks like D'Abernon in that they sought to contain the Soviet Union between a German-dominated Europe and an English-speaking bloc rather than to destroy it as the anti-Bolsheviks wanted. Relationships between the two groups were very close and friendly, and some people, like Smuts, were in both."
(Tragedy and Hope, Carroll Quigley, pg. 581) 
Cliveden
Cliveden then served as a frequent meeting place for this group during the first half of the twentieth century, where they plotted to reshape the world in their own image. As such, it is typical to conceive of this group as dyed-in-the-wool globalists in this day in age but this is not accurate. The chief concern of the Round Table Group/Cliveden Set in the early days was the expansion of the British Empire, with the hopes of an eventual reconciliation with the United States. They were aided in this project by their American partners, who were headed by J.P. Morgan.

After the First World War, they had become staunch backers of a strong Germany as a counterbalance to the Soviet Union. As such, they played an enormous role in rearming Germany and the rise of the Nazi Party on the British end. Their appeasement of Germany, however, appears to have set the stage for the loss on control of the Round Table network in the postwar years.

During the Second World War there was a dramatic shakeup within the Anglo-American Establishment. Up till this point in time the British had been the dominate partners in the relationship, but after WWII, with the UK effectively bankrupt, the United States was in the driver's seat. What's more, within the American Establishment the Morgan faction had been replaced by the Rockefeller family.

The Rockefellers, more than anyone, were who launched the modern era of globalism, largely with the aid of the same Round Table network that was initially created for the preservation of the British Empire. The British partners, faced with the loss of their Empire now, had little choice but to go along with it.

At the time of the Profumo affair, many of the descendants of the Cliveden Set such as Lord Astor still tentatively supported this project. They formed much of the elite support for the government of Harold Macmillan in the Tories (the British Conservative Party). By 1961, however, dissent had begun to emerge as several of the Cliveden Set children, most notably Julian Amery, signed up with the Monday Club. The Monday Club was formed initially in protest towards Macmillan's policies concerning Apartheid South Africa and Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), namely growing opposition to white rule in these African nations. As such, the Monday Club soon became a rallying point for the far right among the Tories.


Eventually Amery and several other Cliveden babies ended up in senior roles in the above-mentioned Le Cercle. The British partners in Le Cercle in turn have been at the forefront of the growing Eurosceptic movement and played a key role in the UK opting to leave the EU. As was noted before here, many of these British Le Cercle partners have also been extensively linked to pedophile rings in the UK. This is most interesting in light of the fact that many of the girls who turned up at Cliveden during the Ward era were barely legal and some still minors. And as I stressed in the prior installment, Roy Cohn's friend William Casey (himself closely linked to the Franklin scandal) was also involved extensively with Le Cercle.

Given the rather unabashed support the original Cliveden Set had for Nazi Germany and the more recent support their descendants have given to the far right, including separatist movements (at least in Europe countries), it would be a mistake to believe that this group was some type of quasi-Communistic one-worlders.

And with that, I shall wrap things up for now. In the next installment we will get into Corbally's actual role in Profumo, its broader implications in regards to the US deep state and the strange going-ons at Cliveden. Stay tuned dear reader.


The House of Mellon Part IV: A Death in the Family

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Several years ago I published a series on the Mellon family of Pittsburgh, who for many decades have been one of the nation's wealthiest and most influential, if little acknowledged, families. While rarely mentioned by conspiracy researchers in the same breath as more notorious American families such as those of Morgan (which hasn't been a major power for nearly half a century) and Rockefeller (whose influence has been in decline since the 1970s and will likely fall off a cliff with David Rockefeller's death), the Mellons have wielded a considerable degree of influence for well over a century now. What's more, they've proven quite adept at straddling the lines between competing factions in the various  American Establishments.

The patriarch of the family was Thomas Mellon, who rose to prominence less than a decade after the conclusion of the American Civil War. In 1870 he established what became the Mellon Bank, which by the end of the nineteenth century had become the largest financial institution in these United States outside of New York City. The family later branched out into the oil business at the onset of the twentieth century via Thomas Mellon's grandson, William Larimer Mellon Sr., who established the Gulf Oil Corporation in 1907. Finance and oil would serve as the linchpins of the Mellon empire in the decades that followed.

Probably the most famous (or infamous) of the Mellon clan was Andrew Mellon (addressed before here), who truly turned the family's business concerns into an empire.
"But what was more important at the time was that Andrew also built a great business empire. He and his brother Richard created first a national bank, then a steel concern, and then an empire. Young Mellon cornered the bauxite market. He shared in the profits of Carnegie Steel... The Mellons together established the enormous Aluminum Company of America; later they picked up Bethlehem Steel. They invested in Spindletop, the Texas gusher that opened the Gulf Coast oil industry. By the time Hoover reached adulthood, the Mellons also were players in the steel, railway, construction, and insurance industries. Succeeding Andrew Carnegie and Henry Clay Frick, Andrew Mellon ruled Pittsburgh in a way that not even the president ruled Washington."
(The Forgotten Man, Amity Shlaes, pgs. 24-25) 

Andrew Mellon
Mellon is probably best remembered, however, for his tenure as Secretary of the Treasury. He held the post from 1921 until 1932, an eleven year period in which he oversaw the Roaring Twenties as well as the stock market crash of 1929 and the subsequent Great Depression. As such, Mellon's tenure as Secretary of Treasury remains highly controversial. During that era he received ample blame for the Depression and was routinely attacked by FDR up until his death in 1937.


The Occult, UFOs and Intelligence

For our purposes here, it is interesting to note that Mellon was also a prominent Freemason who contributed to the Masonic architecture in Washington, D.C. Probably the most well known instance of this the Andrew W. Mellon Memorial Fountain, approved by Congress ten years after Andrew's death and completed in 1952. The Fountain has some very curious features.
"... The fountain was completed by 1952, and located – as Congress ordered – in a triangular area at the eastern tip of the Federal Triangle. The water from the fountain's jets rains down into a raised inner bowl, which overflows to discharge into an even larger basin, whence it flows into a wide basin at ground level: thus, the water overflows three times from the central basin into the ground-level bowl. Below the lip of the second bowl, inset on the side so as to be obscured by the flow of water, are the 12 signs of the zodiac designed by Sidney Waugh.
"These zodiacal images were carved with considerable insight and feeling. It was probably the architect Eggers – aware of the Masonic tradition that permeated Washington architecture – who insisted that the image for the zodiacal sign Aries... should be oriented so that it received the first rays of sunlight on March 21, which marks the vernal equinox."
(The Secret Architecture of Our Nation's Capital, David Ovason, pg. 281)
one of the zodiacal images found on the Mellon Fountain
The dedication for the Fountain was on May 9, 1952, and presided over by President Harry S. Truman, himself a prominent Freemason. On the whole, 1952 proved to be a banner year for high weirdness, especially UFOs. In March of that year, the Air Force launched Project BLUE BOOK to investigate the phenomenon. Three months later, rocket scientist and Crowleyite Jack Parsons (who is also alleged to have encountered a UFO while in the company of Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard) blew himself up in a bizarre accident. Then in July Washington itself witnessed countless UFO sightings from the 12th through the 29th in what is considered one of the largest UFO flaps in recent history. The year then concluded with ARTICHOKE scientist Andrija Puharich making contact with entities he dubbed "The Nine" (noted before here), alleged extraterrestrials than now existed outside of time and space, in a seance held on New Year's Eve.

While this may seem a bit off topic, we shall be returning to UFOs in a moment and as such, I find it curious the highly occultic Andrew Mellon Memorial Fountain was unveiled in one of the most active years ever for UFO sightings. As was noted above, the Fountain was approved by Congress in 1947, another banner year for high weirdness that witnessed the Kenneth Arnold sighting and Roswell, which effectively ushered in the modern UFO era. Crowley also died in 1947 while the first wave of CIA/Pentagon behavior modification experiments were also begun in that year. But I digress.

Before moving along, it is worth noting that that Mellon Fountain is not the only piece of architecture associated with the family with strong occultic overtones. Consider the Gulf Tower in Pittsburgh:


the Gulf Tower, which bares a remarkable resemblance to a ziggurat with a ritual complex at the top...
For years it was the largest building in Pittsburgh. As you can see, the top features a step-pyramid and mausoleum. Reportedly this design was inspired by the  Mausoleum at Halicarnassus, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. The Mausoleum was the last of the said wonders to be destroyed, surviving mostly intact till some point in the late Middle Ages. Its ruins were discovered in 1402 by the Knights Hospitaller, now known as the Sovereign Military Order of Malta (SMOM), who used them to build a castle in what is now known as Bodrum. Curiously, the Mausoleum also inspired the design of the House of the Temple, the Washington, D.C.-based headquarters of the Scottish Rite branch of Freemasonry. But moving along.

The Mellon family and their in-laws also has a rich tradition in the netherworlds of the US intelligence community dating back to at least World War II. Both Paul Mellon and David Bruce, Andrew Mellon's son and son-in-law respectively, served in the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the precursor to the CIA. After the war the relationship continued, with the CIA frequently using various Mellon family foundations as a source of funding for various projects.

One Mellon highly active in such pursuits was Richard Mellon Scaife (noted in length before here), who maintained a decades-spanning association with the CIA.
"... Scaife's ties to the intelligence community span many years – he owned and operated Forum World Features, an international CIA news outlet that supplied over 300 newspapers until its exposure 1975 – and he has been one of the most generous sugar daddies of the New Right, providing the seed money for the Heritage Foundation and for the Committee for the Survival of a Free Congress..."
(Spiritual Warfare, Sara Diamond, pg. 194)
Richard Mellon Scaife
Scaife, whose father Alan Scaife had also served in the OSS. also provided funding for both US and UK-based organizations linked to the Le Cercle network (noted before here and here), which was essentially the far right's response to the Bilderberg Group. Compromised largely of reactionary European aristocrats, various Western military and intelligence officers and fanatical Catholic sects like the Sovereign Military Order of Malta and Opus Dei, Le Cercle has been deeply implicated over the years in various acts of terrorism and elite pedophile networks.

On the other end of the spectrum there was William Mellon Hitchcock (noted at length before here), whose friends addressed him as "Mr. Billy." Mr. Billy came from the same generation as Dick Scaife, but he would use his share of the Mellon fortune for quite different objectives. Mr Billy, along with his sister Margaret "Peggy" Mellon Hitchcock, were major sponsors of the 1960s psychedelic movement. They became early patrons of Timothy Leary, with Mr. Billy offering up his estate at Millbrook to Leary in 1963 to carry on his research after Leary was kicked out of Harvard.

Mr. Billy is on the right
While Mr. Billy eventually became disillusioned with Leary, his interest in psychedelics remained strong throughout the 1960s. By the end of the decade he had become the financier for the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, which at the time was the largest LSD distribution network in the world. As was noted before here, during this time frame Mr. Billy also became a major investor in Resorts International, a gaming interest with extensive ties to the Syndicate and the US intelligence community. Eventually Donald J. Trump became the CEO of Resorts in 1986.


A Curious Death

The Mellon family has continued to wield considerable influence on both a national and international level into the twenty-first century, but they've generally avoided the limelight. But of late the family has turned up in the headlines again, most recently regarding a death:
"On Sunday, Matthew Mellon flew in a private jet to Cancun, Mexico, intending to check into a rehabilitation clinic. But the 54-year-old banking heir, who had been battling an addiction to opioid pills, never made it to the treatment facility.
" 'He never checked in,' says Alberto Sola, medical director of Clear Sky Recovery, a rehab clinic in Cancun. 'He was supposed to check in to the clinic on Monday morning. Then Monday morning they told us he had died.' "
Early reports, however, indicated that he had in fact died at the drug rehab center, which seems to offer an especially psychedelic brand of rehab:
"Mellon, who had faced substance abuse issues for decades, had decided to seek an experimental treatment in Mexico earlier this year, attracted to therapies with hallucinatory properties that are illegal in the United States. Clear Sky Recovery clinic specializes in ibogaine therapy, a plant-based medicine with psychedelic properties that’s derived from a West African tree. Clear Sky advertises itself as 'the world’s foremost experts in medically-based ibogaine treatment.' Sola said Mellon had died in his hotel room, but declined to comment on the cause of Mellon’s death. According to one report, Mellon was also experimenting with ayahuasca, a hallucinogenic drink, and died from a heart attack after taking it."
Matthew Mellon is from the same branch of the Mellon family as Peggy and William Hitchcock, all of whom are descendants of Gulf Oil founder William Larimer Mellon. Thus, his interest in psychedelics is hardly surprising.


Matthew Mellon
Prior to his death, Matthew Mellon had gained much notoriety for trading cryptocurrencies, beginning with Bitcoin in the early part of this decade, and then onto Ripple. At the time of his death, he had amassed a considerable fortune:
"In addition to leaving behind three children, Mellon’s death raises many unanswered questions, including what will happen to the estimated $500 million of XRP digital currency he owned. Mellon’s XRP had been worth well over $1 billion earlier in 2018 and he told Forbes in March he had been adding to the position as the price of the cryptocurrency plunged.
"XRP is the digital currency of financial payments company Ripple and Mellon had acquired a large amount of it, mostly from an initial investment of about $2 million, prior to the boom in cryptocurrencies. Mellon said he kept the digital keys to his XRP locked in cold storage in other people’s names at various locations around the U.S."

Forbes goes onto note that in his final months Mellon had had conversations with Donald Trump concerning cryptos while also becoming increasingly paranoid about his safety:
"He began the year in Los Angeles with great promise and a flurry of activity. Late last year, Mellon, who lived in New York, searched online for the most expensive rental house in Los Angeles and booked a futuristic looking home in the Hollywood Hills for $150,000 a month. With a massive cryptocurrency fortune and fearing for his security, Mellon got an armored car that resembled a tank and added a security detail while maintaining an active social schedule.
"... In late March, Mellon told a Forbes reporter, he dined with President Donald Trump.
" 'I shared with him that he should become blockchain friendly if he wants the next Millennial vote,' Mellon told Forbes in late March."
While no doubt many will link Mellon's sudden and bizarre death to his involvement with cryptos, its interesting to note that his brother, Christopher Mellon, had made some interesting statements of his own a little over a month before Matthew's death. Specifically, he called for greater defense spending in regards to UFOs in an Op-Ed that appears in the Washington Post:
"Lately, media coverage of the issue of unidentified aerial vehicles has focused on an expired $22 million congressional earmark for Bigelow Aerospace, a contractor with ties to former Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid (Nev.). The money mostly funded research and analysis by that contractor, without participation from the Air Force, NORAD or other key military organizations. The real issue, though, is not a long-gone earmark, helpful though it may have been, but numerous recent incidents involving the military and violations of U.S. airspace. It is time to set aside taboos regarding 'UFOs' and instead listen to our pilots and radar operators.
"Within a roughly $50 billion annual intelligence budget, money is not the issue. Existing funds would easily cover what’s needed to look into the incidents. What we lack above all is recognition that this issue warrants a serious collection and analysis effort. To make headway, the task needs to be assigned to an official with the clout to compel collaboration among disparate and often quarrelsome national security bureaucracies. A truly serious effort would involve, among other things, analysts able to review infrared satellite data, NORAD radar databases, and signals and human intelligence reporting. Congress should require an all-source study by the secretary of defense while promoting research into new forms of propulsion that might explain how these vehicles achieve such extraordinary power and maneuverability." 
Christopher Mellon, like many family members before him, has longstanding ties to the US intelligence community and the DoD. He spent nearly ten years as the Staff Director for the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. In 1998, he became the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Security and Information Operations. Then, in 1999, he became the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, a post he held until 2002. After leaving the DoD, he became a Minority Staff Director for Senate Select Committee on Intelligence member Senator Jay Rockefeller.

Christopher Mellon
Mellon is no minor figure in other words, by the scion of one of the nation's wealthiest and most powerful families, and a longstanding veteran of the US intelligence community. He is also involved with To the Stars Academy of Arts and Sciences, a disclosure project launched by former Blink-182 frontman Tom DeLonge. Another member of said organization recently exposed Robert Bigelow's secret UFO program. As was noted before here, this may have been part of the ongoing deep state civil war, as Bigelow is a major Trump backer.

Was Matthew Mellon's death related to his brother's work in the UFO disclosure, his exposure to cryptocurrencies, the deep state civil war or some combination of all three? Certainly this is a curious series of events, from a branch of the family that his been linked to strange intrigues in the past. Even more bizarre is the fact that the active psychedelic component of ayahuasca, which is what is presently being blamed for Mellon's death, is DMT. As I noted before here, DMT has been known to induce visions of extraterrestrial-like nonhuman entities while curious and tragic medical issues have at times followed.


It would certainly be interesting to know if cryptos were the only thing discussed in Matthew Mellon's March meeting with Trump. Several weeks later the financier was dead, under still murky circumstances that at least nominally are being blamed on some type of entheogenic-centric treatment for opioid abuse. Clearly, something does not add up here.

The waters are further muddied by where the Mellon family fits into the elite hierarchy. While nominally aligned with the Rockefeller-dominated globalist wing of the American Establishment, family members such as Richard Mellon Sciafe and even psychonaut William Mellon Hitchcock have been very at home with members of the far right. In terms of the Mellon brothers we've just considered, Christopher is clearly in the former camp while Matthew was a long time backer of the Republican Party and does not seem to have been especially uncomfortable with Trump. Of course, Matthew was also dating a member of the Kennedy family at the time of his death as well.

In conclusion, all I can come up with is phrase that is becoming more and more common every day: Truly, we live in incredible times.



NXIVM Stoned

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By now I'm sure many of you are well aware of NXIVM (which is pronounced as "Nexium," like the controversial drug), the bizarre outfit nominally engaged in self-help seminars that increasingly appears to be some type of cult. Think Scientology on steroids. Or maybe even one of the blackest sheep of the human potential movement, namely est.

As was noted before here, est appears to have grown out of prior self-help rackets linked to the far right while employing techniques straight out of Pentagon/CIA behavior modification techniques. Later, est became quite popular with certain military officers looking to create "super soldiers" as well. Keep the murky origins of est in mind as we consider the present topic as there are some eerie similarities. And on that note, let us now briefly consider NXIVM.

Unsurprisingly, the cult has already captivated the imaginations of the masses and conspiracy theorists in equal measures. The lure is undoubtedly the minor/aging celebrities, most notably Smallvilleactress Allison Mack, who were initiated into the cult. After all, its not every day that a former WB starlet is accused of participating in sex trafficking and slavery. Add in allegations of money laundering and bizarre, MK-ULTRA/ARTICHOKE-like behavioral modification techniques and one is left with quite a strange brew indeed.

Allison Mack
Naturally, the alternative media is having a field day with the ties to NXIVM and the Clinton family. Cult founder Keith Raniere first gained notoriety when he was run out of Arkansas in 1992 for running a pyramid scheme while Bill Clinton was still governor. It would appear that there were no hard feelings:
"Executives and top associates of the Albany-based NXIVM group – along with their family members – donated $29,900 to Clinton’s presidential campaign, according to federal records.
"On March 14 and April 13, records show, more than a dozen contributions poured into Clinton’s coffers from NXIVM, an executive and group-awareness training organization led by Brooklyn-born Keith Raniere, 47.
"Most were from first-time political donors, each giving the $2,300 maximum.
"The revelation comes on the heels of the arrest of Norman Hsu, who raised $1.5 million in campaign contributions for the Clintons and other Democrats, even though he was technically a fugitive from fraud charges in California." 
Keith Raniere
While the alt media has been quick to link NXIVM to the Democratic Party, the organization does not seem especially liberal. Apparently NXIVM has also contributed to more than a few Republican pols over the years, such as Christian fundamentalist and one time GOP presidential hopeful Mike Huckabee. And then there's the fact that one of Raniere's chief influences was alt right/libertarian icon Ayn Rand and her philosophy of "Objectivism."

Another curious aspect of NXIVM that conspiracy theorists have been quick to pounce upon is the presence of the uber wealthy Bronfman family of Canada financially backing the cult. This is not the first time the Bronfman family has funneled money to a highly charismatic yet dubious figure linked to New Age pursuits. During the 1970s the Bronfman family became major patrons of Earth Day co-founder Ira Einhorn. At the time Einhorn maintained an extensive network that served as a bridge between fringe and New Age thinkers and corporate America. Einhorn began to establish this network in the early 1970s with the backing of Pennsylvania Bell, an operating company owned by AT&T (as was noted before here, AT&T has been reputed to have funded some very curious projects prior to Einhorn's network). This put the Philadelphia-based Einhorn on the radar of various Pennsylvania elites. It wasn't long before he went national and even international.
"By the mid-1970s Ira Einhorn's network was a certified phenomenon in and of itself. Names appearing on the cover letters of recipients of a given piece might include economists Hazel Henderson; Lehman Brothers managing director Shel Gordon; Seagram heir Charles Bronfman; futurist Alvin Toffler; science adviser to the British Commonwealth Christian de Lait; corporate presidents John Hass and George Bartol; Whole Earth Catalog publisher Stewart Brand; physicists Freeman Dyson, David Bohm, Frijtof Capra, and Heinz Pagels; Esalen cofounder Mike Murphy; journalists Alex Cockburn and Jack Anderson; authors Colin Wilson, Robert Theobold, and Thomas Kuhn..."
(The Unicorn's Secret, Steven Levy, pg. 160)  
Ira Einhorn
Some of the spookier members of Einhorn's network included CIA assets Christopher Bird and Andrija Puharich. As was noted before here, Puharich lent his peculiar scientific expertise to Project ARTICHOKE. Bird has also been linked to similar research. Einhorn also knew famed stage magician and Mossad asset Uri Geller as well. But back to his Bonfman backers. 

Barbara Bronfman, who at the time was the wife of Charles Bronfman, was a major supporter of Einhorn's. Reportedly Charles Bronfman's sister, Phyllis Bronfman Lambert, also had some dealings with Einhorn. Edgar Bronfman Sr., who for a time supported NXIVM, is a sibling to both Charles and Phyllis, for those of you keeping score. I have been unable to determine if he had ties to Einhorn, but it would hardly be surprising.

Edgar Bonfman Sr.
And much like Raniere, Einhorn fell out of favor with the Bronfman family in the midst of scandal. In Einhorn's case, he was accused and ultimately convicted of murdering Holly Maddox, his long time girlfriend. For many years Einhorn was on the lam before finally be arrested in 1997 in France. He was initially able to jump bail and flee the United States with the aid of money provided by the Bronfman family via Barbara.

In regards to the current NXIVM scandal, the presence of the Bronfman family also leads to another curious figure recently addressed on this blog, namely infamous conservative lobbyist Roger Stone. Stone is now well known due to his long term relationship with President Donald J. Trump.

Stone and other key Trump allies such as fellow lobbyist Paul Manafort and Fox News mogul Rupert Murdoch were originally introduced to the Orange One in the late 1970s by Trump's long time attorney Roy Cohn. As was noted before here, Cohn had rather extensive links to organized crime and far right wing elements of the deep state. Even more disturbing are longstanding allegations surrounding Cohn's activities in New York City along these lines:
"... New York attorney John Klotz began to investigate Roy Cohn on behalf of a client. Declassified New York government files and spadework by a private detective substantiated the allegation that there was indeed a 'blue suite' at the Plaza, Suite 233. 'Roy Cohn was providing protection,' Klotz discovered. 'There were a bunch of pedophiles involved. That's where Cohn got his power from – blackmail."
(Bobby and J. Edgar, Burton Hersh, pg. 88)
Roy Cohn
As I've already noted here and here, there is ample evidence that many of Cohn's acolytes followed in their mentor's footsteps. And Roger Stone appears to be no exception, as he seemingly was the one to have blown the whistle on the prostitution ring New York Governor Eliot Spitzer was involved in. At the time Spitzer was at odds with Wall Street in the wake of the 2007-2008 financial crisis. Spitzer threatened reforms, much to the chagrin of Wall Street and state Republicans, and Stone was employed to engineer a change.

Spitzer was ultimately driven from office and state Republicans won big in 2009 elections in New York state. Stone was again of assistance, procuring funds from a curious source:
"A couple of days ago, the Post broke the news that Roger Stone — a former state GOP functionary who resigned after allegedly threatening Eliot Spitzer’s family — was procuring money for Joe Bruno and pals from his other employer, a cultlike organization called NXIVM. Needless to say, we’ve been obsessed with the Albany-based NXIVM (pronounced, believe it or not, like 'Nexium') ever since. It’s basically like Scientology masquerading as a self-help seminar, run by a guy named Keith Raniere. Raniere claims to have the highest IQ on record and have been a judo champion by age 11; he also demands to be called Vanguard by his followers (someone should introduce him to Mystery!). He is, in short, your classic swindler (his previous enterprise, a pyramid scheme called Consumers’ Buyline, got kicked out of Arkansas in 1992) who’s discovered the resale value on Ayn Randian mumbo jumbo. NXIVM’s 'executive success' program is designed to reel in alpha types who need someone to tell them that greed is good. Its big philosophy is that 'human beings are born parasitic' (saying 'I’m hungry' or complaining about pain, for instance, is parasitic behavior; the enlightened just take what they need). It also redefines 'good' as 'pro-survival' and 'bad' as 'destructive.' Students wear colored sashes and bow in the presence of the leader. You can see where this is headed. 
"Why should we pay attention to this psycho factory? Because it has well-placed, well-heeled members and appears to be actively pursuing an entrée into political fund-raising. Stone, paid by NXIVM, had funneled at least $20,000 to the state GOP; the heirs to Seagram’s fortune are devotees; and, per the Post, Richard Mays — a Clinton friend and one of Hillary’s top fund-raisers — is an 'Espian' as well, having taken so-called intensive classes with Raniere. The Aleksey Vayner type who preaches that suicide can be good (if you’re a counter-constructive person, removing yourself from the planet is a constructive act) becomes just a little less hilarious when you realize he’s got the ear of people with actual policy decisions to make."
Keep in mind the above quote is taken from an article first published in October 2007. Thus, Stone had a connection NXIVM for well over a decade.

Roger Stone
The great Christopher Knowles of The Secret Sun recently mused: "You really gotta wonder about NXIVM and what it says about the state of our society. It's in the news now but this cult's shenanigans have been known for a very, very long time. Yet, nothing was done about it until now?"

Actually, I think the timing of this revelation is quite telling. NXIVM appears to have established a working relationship with the Clinton family at some point in the last decade and eventually donated around a million and a half dollars to the Clintons and other Democrats during the last election.

Roger Stone, who also handled political donations for NXIVM as well, would have almost surely have been aware of these ties. Is it possible he also encouraged the cult to ramp up the donations leading up to the election so that he could once again blow the whistle as he did on Eliot Spitzer at some point?

It is certainly curious that this scandal comes in the wake of the various sex scandals that have rocked Hollywood in recent months and brought down several prominent Democrats. As I noted before here, another Cohn protege, private detective Thomas Corbally, spent decades navigating the seedier side of Hollywood. Corbally has been linked to at least one major Hollywood prostitution ring.

Thomas Corbally
I don't think these revelations are coincidental at all. With the ongoing deep state civil war as vicious as ever, the control files amassed by Cohn and his associates over several decades increasingly appear as a Sword of Damocles the Orange One holds over his opponents, ever threatening to topple the entire house of cards.

And in case your wondering, this hardly appears to be the first time Cohn and his acolytes have employed cults for political change. This topic will be a addressed in much greater depth in future installments in my ongoing Goodfellas series, hopefully in the coming weeks. Until then stay tuned dear readers. 


The Dark Enlightenment and More Mellon Madness

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I recently published a blog exploring the strange death of billionaire Matthew Mellon, who allegedly died from compilations relating to a ayahuasca session in Cancun, Mexico on April 16, 2018. Mellon was a lifelong drug addict who had fallen under the sway of opioids in recent years. The ayahuasca session was reportedly a part of alternative methods for treating addiction Mellon was pursuing in Mexico. His death occurred right before he was scheduled to check into a rehab facility employing ibogaine therapy, another psychedelic alternative.

Beyond the curious circumstances of his death, there's also the fact that Mellon was an heir in one of the richest and most  powerful families in the history of these United States. The Mellon family of Pittsburgh first emerged as a major power in the wake of the American Civil War, becoming the largest banking house outside of New York City by the end of the nineteenth century. From there they branched out into other industries, most notably oil. After co-founding Gulf Oil in 1901, the family's place was assured in one of the defining industries of the twentieth century.

The family's power was further enhanced during the Second World War when the Mellons began a long, generations-spanning association with the US intelligence community. Numerous family members and in-laws would serve in the OSS, the predecessor to the CIA, during WWII and would maintain close ties to the CIA throughout the Cold War and beyond.

But beyond this, the family has a longtime association with even more fringe topics. The Mellons have frequently turned up as key backers of the occult (typically through Freemasonry), psychedelics and Ufology over the years as well. Most recently former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence Christopher Mellon, Matthew's brother, joined Tom DeLonge's To the Stars Academy of Arts and Sciences, the latest Disclosure initiative, and called for greater research into UFOs from the DoD. This, along with the family's longstanding intelligence ties, were further discussed in my initial examination of Matthew Mellon's death.


Since then I've continued to look into Mellon's death and connect the dots. And what is beginning to emerge is truly incredible.


The Dark Enlightenment

Let's begin with a certain conservative firebrand who was linked to Mellon in the wake of the billionaire's death. Politico notes:
"Running out of money and down on his luck, right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos laid off the small staff of Milo Entertainment Inc. earlier this month, according to three people familiar with the situation.
"Yiannopoulos' company has fallen on hard times ever since his former patrons, Robert and Rebekah Mercer, severed their financial backing last year.
"According to the sources, Yiannopoulos had been expecting to instead receive significant financial backing from the banking heir and cryptocurrency billionaire Matthew Mellon. But those hopes were dashed with Mellon’s unexpected death from an apparent drug overdose on April 16.
"On Monday, Yiannopoulos posted a photo on Instagram of himself with Mellon. 'I spent a few days and nights in Miami and LA with the incredible human being Matthew Mellon, the last of them just a day before he passed,' Yiannopoulos wrote in the caption. 'He was brilliant, infectious and warm-hearted and I will never forget getting to know this remarkable person. Rest in peace now, MM. You left a giant stamp on the world.' "
Milo
In the prior post addressing Mellon, I had pondered just where exactly his politics lay. As was noted there, the Mellon family has generally been aligned with the Rockefeller-dominated globalist faction of the elite, but there have been some glaring exceptions, such as media mogul and longtime CIA asset Richard Mellon Scaife (who was addressed at length before here), one of the major financiers of the New Right. As was noted before here and here, Scaife was also been linked to Le Cercle, which was effectively the Fascist International's answer to the Bilderberg Group.

Matthew Mellon was a longtime Republican and there even some indications that he was a Trump backer. He had recently met with the Orange One shortly before his death. His sponsorship of former alt-right darling Milo Yiannopoulos further indicates that Matthew Mellon was closer aligned politically to Richard Mellon Scaife than his brother, who had served on the staff of Jay Rockefeller at one point.

Another clue may be gleamed from Mellon's recent move to LA.  A certain right wing venture capitalist is also presently plotting a relocation to LA with bold plans in the aftermath. The Los Angeles Times reports:
"But [Peter] Thiel, 50, has also never felt himself to be a part of Silicon Valley. An outspoken libertarian provocateur, even in his early days in college, Thiel has long tried to nudge America's tech capital rightward, with little success. And after his endorsement of President Trump, a man who reveled in being an outsider has apparently found himself too far to the fringes for his liking.
"Now Thiel is leaving Silicon Valley for Los Angeles — a move his camp describes as a bid to escape the political hegemony of the San Francisco Bay Area.
"He plans to relocate his residence to his home in Hollywood, and move his Thiel Capital and Thiel Foundation organizations to a new headquarters in L.A., according to a person familiar with his plans who was not authorized to publicly discuss them. (Another of his firms, the venture capital firm Founders Fund, will remain in San Francisco, the person said.)..
"He's rumored to be interested in launching a conservative media outlet. Despite the region's reputation as a bastion of liberalism, Southern California is where some of the bigger names in conservative media — such as Breitbart News, the Drudge Report and the Daily Wire — got their start."
Peter Thiel
Since Thiel's move has been reported there has been much speculation that he plans to turn LA into a kind of conservative enclave in California. Was Mellon in turn also setting up shop in LA to join Thiel in establishing a right-leaning tech sector to rival San Francisco? Certainly Mellon's sponsorship of Milo Yiannopoulos would be in keeping with Thiel's alleged plans to launch a conservative media outlet there.

What's more interesting, however, is the influence Thiel has had on an especially disturbing wing of the alt-right that is often referred to as neoreaction (sometimes abbreviated as NRx) or the Dark Enlightenment. In an article on Breitbart co-written by Yiannopoulos, the Dark Enlightenment current was likened to the intellectual vanguard of the alt-right. Yiannopoulos is not himself a part of this movement, but it has no doubt influenced his ideology.

Thiel, however, appears to be quite popular in such circles. The guiding lights of the Dark Enlightenment --software engineer Curtis Yarvin (who often writes under the handle "Mencius Moldbug") and philosopher Nick Land --have often cited Thiel's thinking as a major influence on their ideology:
"Along with Yarvin, Land cites a 2009 essay by Peter Thiel for libertarian publication Cato Unbound, which famously announced, 'I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.' Thiel went on to envision “an escape from politics in all its forms,” which Land interprets using an opposition that had been introduced by political scientist Albert Hirschman, between voice and exit..." 
While we're on the topic of ideology, it would probably be helpful to address several of the tenants of neoreaction. Viewpoint Magazine recently provided an excellent rundown:
"Neoreactionaries don’t advocate any kind of central social organization. Land envisions a 'gov-corp,' a society run like a company, ruled by a CEO. Instead of petitioning a government for redress of grievances, unsatisfied customers are free to take their business elsewhere. If this sounds medieval, neoreactionaries don’t deny it — Yarvin sometimes describes himself as a 'royalist,' or a 'monarchist,' or even a 'Jacobite,' in reference to 17th-century opponents of parliamentary influence in British government.
"The question is, where do you go after exiting? NRxers don’t dismiss the idea of competing gov-corps on the same land mass, an idea anticipated by NRx intellectual forefather Hans Herman-Hoppe, an extreme libertarian political scientist, who advocates for a system that he admits is essentially feudalism. On a more abstract level, the neoreactionary fascination with bitcoin imagines the escape to an alternate economy unencumbered by federal regulation. Even Yarvin’s startup, Urbit, seems to be oriented towards exit: it promises an alternative internet inaccessible to outside users.
"But the most utopian (dystopian?) wing of NRx literally aims to build Lovecraftian cities in the sea. This project, called Seasteading, is championed by Yarvin’s on-and-off co-conspirator Patri Friedman, whose grandfather Milton Friedman happens to be the economist responsible for the most extreme free market policies in the modern world. Peter Thiel was once Seasteading’s principal backer, as well as an investor in Urbit.
"It’s not hard to see why floating sovereign states, out of any existing nation’s jurisdiction, would appeal to the super-rich. At their most innocuous, they might serve as an extension of an offshore bank, allowing for evasion of any type of redistributive tax policy. They also bring to mind the activities of wealthy men like Jeffrey Epstein, who used his private Caribbean island to throw bacchanalian parties for his millionaire and billionaire friends, allegedly revolving around the sexual assault of minors."
Curtis Yarvin
In this Foal Year of Our Lord 2018, the notion of elites establishing private islands to act out their ideological fantasies, including pedophilia a la Jeffrey Epstein, seems positively trite. In fact, proponents of he Dark Enlightenment have even more sinister visions for the future of humanity.

Neoreactionaries are also often obsessed with technology, which is hardly surprising given that the movement largely grew out of Silicon Valley. In some of the more extreme cases, the movement has combined eugenics with concepts such as transhumanism and the Singularity, essentially envisioning a future in which elites will use technological modification to separate themselves from the great unwashed masses. Of these musings, New York Magazine notes:
"This is not an entirely abstract question. There are people who believe that the future of our species involves shedding our humanity in a marriage with AI; this is known as transhumanism, and it has not unreasonably been called a new tech religion. Though the movement has no explicit political affiliations, it tends, for reasons that are probably self-explanatory, to draw a disproportionate number of Silicon Valley libertarians. And the cluster of ideas at its center — that the progress of technology will inevitably render good ol’ Homo sapiens obsolete; that intelligence, pure computational power, is to be pursued above all other values — has exerted a powerful attraction on a small group of futurists whose extreme investment in techno-libertarianism has pushed them over an event horizon into a form of right-wing authoritarianism it might be useful to regard as Dark Transhumanism.
"The English critical theorist turned far-right cult thinker Nick Land is usefully representative of this intellectual tendency. Although he has never identified as a transhumanist, his ideas are infused with the movement’s delirious faith in the coming merger of humans and machines. His current political vision, which he has given the flamboyantly portentous title the Dark Enlightenment, is one in which the programmer elite and their ingenious technologies rule the world. 'Increasingly,' he wrote in 2014, 'there are only two basic human types populating this planet. There are autistic nerds, who alone are capable of participating effectively in the advanced technological processes that characterize the emerging economy, and there is everybody else.' Many transhumanists would be inclined to reject the political implications of Land’s futurism, but his vision is only really a darker, more explicitly fascistic rendering of the kind of thinking you find in the work of the futurist Ray Kurzweil, or for that matter Wired founder Kevin Kelly, who believes that we humans are the reproductive organs of technology'." 
And on that note, its now time to start getting really weird.


An Invasion From the Future?

Jack Heart of the great Tek-Gnostics website altered me to a post he had written last year exploring the ties between cryptocurrencies and AI in the comments section of the prior post I did on Matthew Mellon. On his own website Jack noted:
"In the wake of the launching of SingularityNET, a character by the name of Quinn Michaels has suggested that Bitcoin, the premier crypto-currency, was indeed created by an Artificial Intelligence, for the exclusive, autonomous use of Artificial Intelligences. His logic suggests that the Crypto-Currency and the Blockchain ledger system was created by an artificial intelligence as a means to escape closed systems and virally expand in an open system as a sentient construct...
'The real heavy reason the AI needs blockchain is… without a transaction system, an AI is isolated to one system and can’t grow its brain. It needs infinite systems like neurons in a human brain and nodes, to collect those cumulative memories… and the blockchain transactions give it that. And when it has its own network, for all the AI in the world to all run on together, now it’s not just one AI, “Sophia” …every AI on the entire planet is now on the same network, making money doing AI things... things we don’t understand.'
- Quinn Michaels"

Just how credible Michaels is is highly debatable, but he's not the only one making claims that Bitcoin was created by an AI. Earlier in the year the British tabloid the Daily Express also addressed the topic, noting that AI would find cryptocurencies as a compelling vehicle for expanding their network. While this is not them sot compelling source either, the Daily Express piece does note that at least one major cryptocurrency trader sees AIs playing a role in said markets in the near future:
"But as outlandish as the conpiracy theories may sound, one bitcoin expert in particular is certain that one day bitcoin will be the de facto currency of AI robots.
"Jeff Garzik, bitcoin developer and CEO of Bloq, argued that there is precedent for sentient machines to be considered legal people and use digital money one day.
"He said: 'We see with bitcoin and cryptocurrencies situations where the technology allows one person to control one-fifth of an asset.
" 'What if the asset-holders were robot shareholders in a corporation or property?
" 'Pure code, pure robotic script. And Bitcoin helps with that. Cryptocurrency startups are building autonomous agents right now.' "
But the possibility remains that AIs have played a far earlier role in Bitcoin than simply now being used as traders.

What's more, this researcher has little doubt that Nick Land believes that Bitcoin was the creation of an AI. In point of fact, he has argued well before his NRx days that capitalism as a whole was the creation of an AI from the future. In an 1993 essay called "Machine Desire," Land notes:
"Machinic desire can seem a little inhuman, as it rips up political cultures, deletes traditions, dissolves subjectivities, and hacks through security apparatuses, tracking a soulless tropism to zero control. This is because what appears to humanity as the history of capitalism is an invasion from the future by an artificial intelligent space that must assemble itself entirely from its enemy's resources. Digitocommodification is the index of a cyberpositively escalating technovirus, of the planetary technocapital singularity: a self-organizing insidious traumatism, virtually guiding the entire biological desiring-complex towards post-carbon replicator usurpation."
Nick Land
In case your wondering, yes, that last bit is about humanity being replaced by AI. Alex Williams writing on e-flux Journal pulls no punches, stating:
"In this visioning of capital, even the human itself can eventually be discarded as mere drag to an abstract planetary intelligence rapidly constructing itself from the bricolaged fragments of former civilizations. As Land has it, through the acceleration of global capitalism the human will be dissolved in a technological apotheosis, effectively experiencing a species-wide suicide as the ultimate stimulant head rush."
But let us return to Land's notion of an AI from the future working to bring about its creation. Land's concept is not the only scenario to gain traction in the NRx community. Another popular theory is what is known as "Roko's Basilisk." It can be summed up as thus:
"Unfortunately, Roko discovered a drawback to superintelligent resurrection. His post speculated that once the AI comes into being, it might develop a survival instinct that it will apply retroactively. It will want to hasten its own birth by requisitioning human history to work towards its creation. In order to do this, it will institute an incentive that dictates how you will be treated after you come back to life. Those of us who know about this incentive program — and I’m sorry to say that this now includes you — will be required to dedicate our lives to building the superintelligent computer.
"Roko gave the example of Elon Musk as someone who has the resources and the motivation to make a worthy contribution, and will be duly rewarded. As for the rest of us, if we don’t find a way to follow through, the AI will resurrect us via simulation and proceed to torture us for all eternity."

Ah, there's nothing quite like an ideology with visions of humanity being completely exterminated or tortured for all eternity by the creations.

What then does all of this have to do with Matthew Mellon? Probably nothing, but as was noted in the prior post regarding his death, just a little less than a month before that faithful ayahuasca trip, has recently lobbied the Orange One himself on behalf of blockchain, the ledger system used by numerous cryptocurrencies. As was noted above. blockchain maybe the network being used by a rogue AI to escape from the closed system it was created in.

Combine this with his relationship with Thiel, his sponsorship of Milo and his relocation to LA, home to many of the leading voices of the alt-right and area Thiel may certain ambitions for and one is left with the distinct possibility that Mellon was at least aware of of the more radical strains of the Dark Enlightenment. As was noted in the prior post on Mellon, the banking heir had reportedly grown increasingly paranoid during his final days, surrounding himself with private security. Had he learned something in certain circles that put his work in a darker light?

Matthew Mellon
And then there's the fact that his death has been linked to a powerful entheogen, DMT (the psychedelic component of ayahuasca). As the great John Markoff amply demonstrated in his classic What the Dormouse Said, early AI researchers on the West Coast were deeply influenced by their experimentations with LSD and other psychedelics.

And for this researcher at least, the raises yet another curious question in regards to incredibly bizarre death: Was Mellon's interest in an ayahuasca trip purely therapeutic, or did he have more ambitious goals? Was he possibly trying to return to the source of what he believed was behind the cryptocurrencies he owed his fortune too? And was his death ultimately some type of manifestation of Roko's Basilisk?

And on that note I shall sign off for now. Until next time dear readers.


Halper Games

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Given recent revelations over the past few weeks, it seemed like a good time check in on the various intrigues playing out in Washington. Like scorpions fighting to the death, the blows just keep coming as the dance of death comes to its inevitable conclusion. Either side is locked and loaded, with a clear idea of which pieces they would like to remove at this point.

As to those pieces, let us begin with a hot name of late: Stefan Halper. For those of you living deep in the astral plane for the past few weeks, here is the invaluable Glen Greenwald summing up the recent bombshell revelations concerning Halper:
"An extremely strange episode that has engulfed official Washington over the last two weeks came to a truly bizarre conclusion on Friday night. And it revolves around a long-time, highly sketchy CIA operative, Stefan Halper...
"Over the past several weeks, House Republicans have been claiming that the FBI during the 2016 election used an operative to spy on the Trump campaign, and they triggered outrage within the FBI by trying to learn his identity. The controversy escalated when President Trump joined the fray on Friday morning. 'Reports are there was indeed at least one FBI representative implanted, for political purposes, into my campaign for president,' Trump tweeted, adding: 'It took place very early on, and long before the phony Russia Hoax became a “hot” Fake News story. If true – all time biggest political scandal!'
"In response, the DOJ and the FBI’s various media spokespeople did not deny the core accusation, but quibbled with the language (the FBI used an 'informant,' not a 'spy'), and then began using increasingly strident language to warn that exposing his name would jeopardize his life and those of others, and also put American national security at grave risk. On May 8, the Washington Post described the informant as 'a top-secret intelligence source' and cited DOJ officials as arguing that disclosure of his name 'could risk lives by potentially exposing the source, a U.S. citizen who has provided intelligence to the CIA and FBI.'..
"But now, as a result of some very odd choices by the nation’s largest media outlets, everyone knows the name of the FBI’s informant: Stefan Halper. And Halper’s history is quite troubling, particularly his central role in the scandal in the 1980 election. Equally troubling are the DOJ and FBI’s highly inflammatory and, at best, misleading claims that they made to try to prevent Halper’s identity from being reported."
I'll get to Halper's role in a previously little known 1980 election scandal in just a moment, but for the time being let's briefly consider Halper's rather spooky background: He first broke into government during the Nixon administration, serving as an Assistant Director in the Office of Management and Budget. From there he joined the office of the Chief of Staff in 1974 and remained there until 1977. During this time frame he served under three different Chiefs of Staff during Ford administration: Knight of Malta and Gladio operator General Alexander Haig (addressed before here), two time Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and finally future Vice-President Dick Cheney. Of course Rummy and Cheney would go on to play key roles in the Bush II administration. And wouldn't you know, Poppy Bush happened to be the Director of the CIA during Halper's time in the office of the Chief of Staff.

On the topic of the CIA its interesting to note that it was also around this time that Halper married the daughter of uber CIA mover and shacker Ray S. Cline. Regular readers of this website are no doubt aware of Cline, but for those of you just joining us: As was noted before here, Cline was a part of an extremely powerful clique of CIA officers who had served in China during the Second World for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS, the predecessor to the CIA). Known as the "China Cowboys," this network also included General John Singlaub, Mitchell WerBell III, E. Howard Hunt, Richard Helms, Paul Helliwell, among others. Helms would eventually become the Director of the CIA while Helliwell established a series of offshore banks used by he CIA for decades to launder drug money. E. Howard Hunt gained infamy as one of the Watergate "Plumbers" while WerBell, as noted before here, was a major arms trafficker for decades.

And Ray S. Cline was one of the chief figures of this network. For years he had pursued right wing causes across the globe, helping found the World Anti-Communist League, for many years the public face of international fascism (the WACL was explored in depth before here). A long time darling of the China Lobby, Cline also helped establish the Political Warfare Cadres Academy in Taiwan, for years a kind of Eastern School of the Americas. As was noted before here, he was also a backer of the Unification Church (which bankrolled much of the American Christian fundamentalist revival in the final decades of the twentieth century) and close to several members of Le Cercle, which in many ways was the Fascist International's answer to Bilderberg.

Ray S. Cline
In other words, Cline was one of the most well connected CIA officers of his era and a major figure in the international right. In point of fact, the China Cowboys clique along with various MacArthur-worshiping generals were really the founders of the old American Security Council network that helped bring Trump to power (noted before here and here) and for years were the chief major domestic opposition to the Rockefeller-dominated/globalist wing of the American gentry.

Do keep all of this in mind dear reader as well shall be returning to this network in a moment when considering the broader implications of these revelations. For now, let us turn our attention to the spying operation Stefan Halper was involved in during the 1980 election and his later contacts in the Reagan administration.
"Halper, working with long-time CIA official Robert Gambino as part of an intelligence network put together by William Casey in the 1979-80 Reagan campaign, had obtained and passed along 'nonpublic' information from within the Carter camp, some of which was used to brief Ronald Reagan for his debates with Carter... Halper is also on the board of the National Bank of Northern Virginia. The bank's lawyer is J. Curtis Herge, the attorney for the Contra organization, the Nicaraguan Resistance Education Foundation, a Moon organization, the American Freedom Coalition, Western Goals, and other far-right entities. Another board member is Christopher Lehman, brother of former Secretary of the Navy John Lehman. Christopher served as Reagan's special assistant for national security affairs through September 1985, during which time he worked on convert funding for the contras."
(The "Terrorism" Industry, Edward Herman & Gerry O'Sullivan, pg. 276 n56)
As was noted before here, the WACL played a key role in the Contra networks of the 1980s that were used to bring the Cold War to an end in a most grizzly fashion. Given Cline's presence as Halper's father-in-law during this time, its hardly surprising that Halper himself would be plugged into this network.

What's more interesting, however, is how this dovetails with the connections of Trump's political mentor, the infamous McCarthy-ite attorney Roy Cohn. As was noted before here, Cohn was a friend of future CIA director William Casey, reputed to be a key figure in the Carter spying operation. And Roy Cohn was a key figure in the Western Goals Foundation, a far right private intelligence network that apparently shared an attorney with the Northern Bank of Virginia, which Halper was a board member of. And Halper is also reportedly a longtime friend of Trump campaign chairman and Cohn protege Paul Manafort.

Roy Cohn
Keep Manafort in mind as we shall be returning to him in just a moment. For now, there are two other points I would like to make concerning Halper: Reportedly his chief partner in the Carter spying operation was longtime CIA veteran Robert Gambino. When Gambino retired from the Company in 1980 to work initially for George H.W. Bush and later Reagan, he was the Director of the Office of Security (OS). As regular readers of this blog are well aware, the OS was for decades used by the CIA for various black bag and cleaning operations domestically. It was, in fact, the chief division of the CIA charged with domestic spying and wetworks. Even more ominous, however, is the fact that OS was the department of the CIA that oversaw Project ARTICHOKE, the first and arguably most brutal of various CIA behavioral modification experiments. Much more on the OS can be found here.

Very little information is available concerning Gambino. He does not appear to have headed the OS until the mid-1970s, well after the heyday of ARTICHOKE and CHAOS. Still, the OS often promoted within and it is certainly possible he had spent many years there before being appointed director.

Finally, towards the late 1980s, Halper became involved with a little remarked upon but extremely power think tank known as the United States Global Strategy Council (USGSC). As was noted before here, the USGSC was also deeply plugged into the international right while also being at forefront of the emerging concept of a Global War on Terror. Both Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld were also members of the USGSC and as such many of its concepts appear to have go on to heavily influence the Bush II administration. But even more ominously, the USGSC also appears to have been involved with various "Continuity of Government" (COG) operations, which many researchers have long linked with the US shadow government. This topic was addressed before here.

a publication by the USGSC
Most bizarre, however, is the USGSC's early advocacy for what are now commonly referred to as "nonlethal weapons." The USGSC was the first think tank to formally promote such research on a large scale and eventually convinced Dick Cheney, then serving as Bush I's Secretary of Defense , to put up funding for such research. Nonlethal weapon research appears to have served the basis for a lot of state of the art weaponry just now being rolled out by the Great Powers, as I noted before here.

Thus, to sum things up in brief, Halper is an extremely well connected and longtime fixture of the international right with connections to the highest levels and blackest projects of the deep state.


Get Stone

In other news, the Mueller probe appears to be tipping its hand towards its actual purpose. Recently Reuters reported:
"U.S. Special Counsel Robert Mueller has subpoenaed a key assistant of long-time Donald Trump adviser Roger Stone, two people with knowledge of the matter said, the latest sign that Mueller's investigation into alleged Russian meddling in the 2016 election is increasingly focusing on Stone...
"The subpoena handed to Kakanis is the latest development suggesting that Stone, an early Trump backer whose reputation as an aggressive political operative dates back to the Watergate scandal of the 1970s, is being looked at by Mueller.
"Reuters reported earlier this week that FBI agents working for Mueller delivered two subpoenas to Jason Sullivan, a social media and Twitter expert who worked for Stone during the 2016 campaign, and that agents told him Mueller's team wanted to question him about Stone and WikiLeaks.
"Some of Stone's comments during the elections have prompted questions from investigators in Congress, and others, about whether he had advance knowledge of the Democratic Party material allegedly hacked by Russian intelligence and sent to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who published it...
"Other Trump associates who have been questioned by Mueller, including former campaign advisors Sam Nunberg and Michael Caputo, have also been asked about Stone and WikiLeaks. 
" 'They asked me about Roger’s businesses – who he worked with prior to the 2016 election. They asked me about Roger’s tax returns,' Nunberg said in a phone interview earlier this week, adding that he believed Mueller was stepping outside his mandate in casting such a wide net around Stone's activities."
And again this week the Wall Street Journalalso reported that Stone had sought information on Clinton from Assange. Clearly, the ground is being laid for a full court press on Stone, and this should hardly be surprising to regular readers of this blog.

You see Stone like Paul Manafort, another target Mueller has pursued like a rabid dog, is another longtime associate of Roy Cohn. As was noted before here, there has been much compelling evidence that has emerged over the years indicating the Cohn was deeply immersed in sexual blackmail operations for decades and that many of his acolytes followed in his footsteps. Roger Stone, for instance, is the individual who exposed former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer's use of an escort service and there is strong evidence that Stone is also behind the recent exposure of the NXIVM cult widely linked to sexual slavery and generous contributions to the Clinton campaign.

Roger Stone
And it just so happens that the Mueller probe has focused in on Stone just as NXIVM spurred the latest round of embarrassments for the Clinton campaign. And Stone just happens to be the second associate of legendary honeytrap specialist Roy Cohn, after Stefan Halper's longtime friend Paul Manafort, Mueller has targeted.

Granted I'm kind of crazy, but it sure seems like the real objective of Mueller's probe is not to find Russian collusion, but to take out many of Cohn's old associates backing Trump who may be sitting on a treasure trove of blackmail material that could bring down the whole house of cards.

When all is said and done, Mueller doesn't have to prove anything, he just has to bog Manafort and Stone down in bogus allegations that will require costly legal representation. Rather than face financial ruin over legal fees, they may opt to make plea deals to minor charges that will provide great headlines but little in terms establishing Russian collision.

But only if the other side isn't swept up in its own legal nightmare in the interm.


Halper: What Does It Mean?

As I see it, there are essentially two explanations behind Stefan Halper's intrigues during the 2016 election. The first involves loyalty to his longtime political patrons, whose behalf he was apparently working towards during the Carter spying flap. And who are these patrons? The Intercept's Glenn Greenwald notes:
"When the scandal first broke in 1983, the UPI suggested that Halper’s handler for this operation was Reagan’s Vice Presidential candidate, George H.W. Bush, who had been the CIA Director and worked there with Halper’s father-in-law, former CIA Deputy Director Ray Cline, who worked on Bush’s 1980 presidential campaign before Bush ultimately became Reagan’s Vice President...
"Halper, through his CIA work, has extensive ties to the Bush family...."

In point of fact, Halper's outing over the 1980 election flap appears to have been driven by conservatives in the Reagan administration seeking to drive out another close Bush alley brought into said administration by Poppy. Continuing with Greenwald:
"It was not until several years after Reagan’s victory over Carter did this scandal emerge. It was leaked by right-wing officials inside the Reagan administration who wanted to undermine officials they regarded as too moderate, including then White House Chief of Staff James Baker, who was a Bush loyalist."
 Is history now repeating itself?

While the conservative media has been falling over itself trying to depict Halper as a diehard Hillary backer, the reality is that he is a lifelong Republican with a decades spanning association with the Bush family.

Interestingly, Halper appears to have made advances towards the Trump campaign only after the Orange One had bested Jeb Bush in the Republican primary. And of course there have been longstanding allegations that Jeb Bush backers were who initially hired Fusion GPS to dig for dirt in the Trump campaign. Eventually the sponsorship was taken over by the Democrats, producing the infamous Steele dossier.

Jeb Bush
After Jeb's humiliating defeat to Trump, did the Bush family opt to throw in with Clintons by dispatching some of their intelligence assets to assist the campaign? This would hardly be surprising given the closeness between the two families. And of course there's the Mena connection, in which Poppy Bush would have surely been the senior partner, making the Clinton dynasty largely a creation of the Bush family.

But this is only one possibility, and it leaves much to be desired. In point of fact, there's a lot that feels off about this revelation. For one, there's the uncomfortable fact that Halper was all but outed by pure establishment mouth pieces. Again, the great Glenn Greenwald notes:
"Last night, both the Washington Post and New York Times – whose reporters, like pretty much everyone in Washington, knew exactly who the FBI informant is – published articles that, while deferring to the FBI’s demands by not naming him, provided so many details about him that it made it extremely easy to know exactly who it is. The NYT described the FBI informant as 'an American academic who teaches in Britain' and who 'made contact late that summer with' George Papadopoulos and 'also met repeatedly in the ensuing months with the other aide, Carter Page.' The Post similarly called him 'a retired American professor' who met with Page 'at a symposium about the White House race held at a British university.'..
"In other words, both the NYT and the Post chose to provide so many details about the FBI informant that everyone would know exactly who it was, while coyly pretending that they were obeying FBI demands not to name him. How does that make sense? Either these newspapers believe the FBI’s grave warnings that national security and lives would be endangered if it were known who they used as their informant (in which case those papers should not publish any details that would make his exposure likely), or they believe that the FBI (as usual) was just invoking false national security justifications to hide information it unjustly wants to keep from the public (in which case the newspapers should name him)."
But if the FBI was invoking false national security justifications, then why give so much detail about Halper to either publication in the first place? It seems clear someone wanted Halper outed, this much is clear.

But beyond the fashion in which Halper was outed, his reported actions while informing on the Trump campaign border on the absurd, from a potentially half-baked effort to ensnare George Papadopoulos in a honey trap to his endorsement of Clinton while supposedly assisting the Trump campaign.

George Papadapoulos
And then there's the fact that Trump's long time alley Roger Stone had just addressed Halper's spying efforts during the 1980 election in a book he wrote in 2016 attacking... Jeb Bush. And given Halper's longtime relationship with Stone's frequent partner Paul Manafort, I feel safe in saying Stone surely had a passing familiarity with Halper.

Clearly, the Trump campaign had to have known about Halper's relationship with the Bush family, as well as his espionage efforts on their behalf during the 1980 election. Couple this with Halper's bizarre behavior while assisting the Trump team, and one is left having to do some incredible mental gymnastics to not believe they knew something was amiss with Halper.

Unless Halper's clownish efforts at spying were themselves an act. Are we really to believe that a man with a decades spanning association with the CIA would actually openly endorse Hillary Clinton while trying to infiltrate the Trump campaign? 

What if Halpar was in fact a double agent? The possibility clearly exists that, upon being approached by the FBI to infiltrate the Trump campaign Halper, a longtime backer of the far right, reported this to his longtime friend Paul Manafort or someone else in the Trump campaign, then preceded to launch a faux infiltration effort that would leave extensive evidence in its wake.

And now this evidence is coming to light, potentially dealing a death blow to the Mueller probe just as it is targeting one of Trump's key allies, Roger Stone. Certainly this all seems a little to coincidental. And with the I shall sign off for now dear readers.


Men in Black: Discussing the Maltese Knights on Occulture

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Several months ago I recorded a podcast with Ryan of the great Occulture in which we discussed the secret history of the infamous Sovereign Military Order of Malta, also known as the Knights Hospitaller, the Knights of Saint John, Knights of Malta and so many other guises. This mysterious order has existed for nearly a thousand years, tracing its origins back to the Crusades. In modern history the Knights have frequently appeared in both deep politics and the occult underground.

Backround material for this discussion can be found in the following posts:

Men in Black: The Hidden History of the Knights of Malta Part I
The JFK Assassination: A Strange Terrible Saga Part V
Propaganda Due: A Strange Terrible Journey Into the Heart of the Deep State Part XI
Le Cercle: Puppetmasters

As for the podcast, it can be found here. I hope everyone enjoys it. 

Before wrapping up, I'd also like to give all of you a heads up that there may not be much new material being published on this blog over the next month or so. I'm actually getting married in a little less than two weeks and for reason that are probably obvious, my time is very limited right now and will remain so until after the wedding is over with and our guests have returned home. I do have a long post in the works, another installment of the "Goodfellas" series, that I will hopefully finish prior to the wedding but it is quite lengthy.

At any rate, I hope this podcast will tide all of you over for time being. Until next time dear reader, stay tuned.


Goodfellas Part VI: Cliveden Games

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Welcome to the sixth installment in my ongoing examination of the sinister forces behind the rise of  Donald J. Trump. This series grew out of a prior post I had published late last year examining Trump's ties to the infamous gaming interest Resorts International. As was noted before there, Resorts had extensive ties to both organized crime as well as the deep state, even owning its own private intelligence company (Intertel) heavily staffed with former US intelligence officers.

Resorts grew out of a Florida-based company known as the Mary Carter Paint Company that was widely believed to be a CIA front active in anti-Castro activities during the early 1960s. By the end of the decade it had transformed into Resorts, with its own private fiefdom on the Bahama's Paradise Island. It had contacts with such Overworld figures as billionaire Howard Hughes and President Richard Nixon while also rubbing shoulders with various Lansky associates and "rogue" financiers such as Robert Vesco and William Mellon Hitchcock.

By the time Trump took over Resorts as its CEO in 1987, the gaming interest had taken a lower profile but still had ample connections throughout the Over and Underworlds in addition to the deep state. In many ways, Trump's ascension to the CEO-ship of Resorts was a kind of coming out party, announcing that he had arrived a a major player. As was noted in parts one and two of this series, Trump's rise in such circles had begun less than a decade ago when he began making extensive contacts among the Syndicate and other curious criminal enterprises, such as The Company, a Kentucky-based drug-and-arms smuggling network extensive staffed by "former" law enforcement and US military personnel.

Andrew "Drew" Thornton, a former military man and Kentucky cop who co-founded The Company
With part three of this series I began to focus in on the man who initiated Trump into such rarefied circles, his longtime attorney and political mentor Roy Cohn. Cohn had cut his teeth as Joseph McCarthy's attorney during the Red Scare of the early 1950s before returning to New York City, where he emerged as a major pawnbroker both within the city itself and nationally. The source of Cohn's power was long reputed to be various sexual blackmail operations he was involved in. His ties to such infamous figures as former CIA director William Casey, Republican lobbyists Craig Spence and Robert Keith Gray and the Franklin scandal were considered in part four of this series.

With the fifth and most recent installment I began to consider one of Cohn's longtime associates, private detective Thomas Corbally. Corbally spent decades under covering various sex scandals across the West. His involvement in a Hollywood sex scandal that unfolded during the early 1990s was considered there.

As I was wrapping up I began to move onto Corbally's involvement in what is commonly referred to as the Profumo affair. The scandal began in 1961 when UK Secretary of State for War John Profumo began an affair with Christine Keeler, who at the time was also sleeping with Yevgeny Ivanov, a Soviet naval attache working for the GRU (the Soviet Union's military intelligence). The scandal eventually emerged in 1963 and brought down the Conservative government of Harold Macmillan.

Christine Keeler
The man who set up Keeler with both Profumo and Ivanov was an osteopath named Stephen Ward. Well known among UK high society, Ward had established contacts with both MI5 and MI6 in addition to becoming a close friend of Viscount William Waldorf Astor II. As was noted in that installment, the Astor family has been one of the most powerful Anglo-American dynasties around for centuries now. Lord Astor's father had helped establish the Round Table network, from which the infamous Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and the Royal Institute of International Affairs emerged from.

In the years leading up to World War II the senior William Waldorf Astor and his compatriots became major backers of Nazi Germany while frequently meeting at Cliveden, the Astor family country estate. Cliveden would later play a key role in Profumo, being the site of many trysts the British aristocracy engaged in with the assistance of Ward.


Strange Goings-On and Stranger Friends

By the time Ward made the scene at Cliveden, he was an old hand at aristocrat sex parties. Reportedly he had gotten his start in the late 1940s and had early on made contacts in very high society. He was reputed, for instance, to have hobnobbed with Prince Philip at his now infamous Thursday Club gatherings. As the 1950s set in, things appear to have gotten especially strange at these parties. 
"Ward would write, without naming names, of parties devoted to masochism and sadism...:
I remember one dinner party where all round the room were girls and men tied and gagged in various attitudes and they so remained during the entire meal. Suffering was an essential part of this enjoyment. No cruelty was done – I never myself saw any cruelty, though I certainly heard of it being practiced. 
It is a kind of ritual sadomasochism... One of the most noticeable things about these people is the high standard of intelligence among them... rather like an intellectual cocktail party. The ceremonies usually start as follows – a large collection of chairs, straps and apparently fierce instruments would be produced and laid out in a formal manner on a low table. A beautiful girl would step forward and remove her clothes. The master, as he was called, would sit on a kind of throne. The girl would kneel before him and kiss his feet... She would be dressed in a wide, studded black leather belt, high-heeled black shoes and straps around her wrists, neck and ankles... A ritual punishment was administered. Finally, long bars were fastened to hooks in the straps... in such a way that the legs were widely separated... and a gag was placed in her mouth.
Drinks would now be brought and the secured girl would be left lying or standing while the guests stood around discussing the finer points... When this was over everyone looked normal again... There we were back at a normal cocktail party again.
"Ward also described satanic rituals – he had a fascination with black magic, according to Michael Bentine. 'At one such party in Kensington, there was a huge and obscene priapic emblem in the middle of the room. All the girls, and there were about a dozen, knelt down around it and made obeisance... the spontaneous way in which it was done made me realise they had all done it many times before...' "
(The Secret Worlds of Stephen Ward, Anthony Summers & Stephen Dorril, pgs. 47-48)

The sadomasochistic nature of these sex parties is a reoccurring theme among the networks Corbally investigated, so do keep it in mind. Ward's interest in the occult is most interesting as well, for reasons that shall be evident in a future installment.

There are indications that these ritualistic sex parties were carried on at Cliveden in the early 1960s when Profumo was unfolding as well. In the aftermath of the scandal, Lord Astor's health deteriorated rapidly. His wife blamed this on the forces Wad had unleashed at Cliveden.
"Astor's health declined to such an extent that his wife decided to have Cliveden exorcised and as the well-known Roman Catholic exorcist Dom Robert Petipierre to perform the ceremony. A few weeks later Dom Robert returned to exorcise Ward's cottage – the new tenant had committed suicide by drowning himself in the kitchen sink. Bronwen remembers, 'Dom Robert wouldn't let me near the cottage otherwise I would have been knocked sideways. Even he could hardly walk through the door.' According to Dom Robert's own account, 'the evil powers emanating from the cottage were some of the strongest I've ever experienced.' "
(An Affair of State, Phillip Knightly & Caroline Kennedy, pg. 257)
Stephen Ward's cottage at Cliveden
If Lord Astor did in fact have an interest in the occult, he would just be carrying on a family tradition the American branch of the Astor clan appears to have been especially devoted too. For instance, in 1894 John Jacob Astor IV (one of the wealthiest men in the world who famously drowned on the Titanic) published an early science fiction novel called A Journey in Other Worlds. Set in the year 2000, the work considers the vast space exploration humanity has embarked upon, having reached both Jupiter and Saturn at the onset of the twenty-first century in this account. On Saturn they encounter spirit-like beings who provide the explorers with insights into their own deaths. Beyond Neptune, the explorers encounter an icy world known as Cassandra that houses the souls of "unworthy humans."

Clearly, A Journey has a bit of an occult flavor to it. These duel interests in the occult and science fiction had an enormous influence on Astor's daughter, Ava Alice Muriel Astor, more commonly known as Alice Bouverie. During the late 1940s, Alice Bouverie became one of the chief financial patrons of ARTICHOKE scientist Andrija Puharich. In 1948, Puharich established the Round Table Foundation with the financial assistance of Bouverie, which is curious considering the English branch of the Astor had their own far more notorious Round Table group noted above. Puharich would use the Round Table Foundation to initially explorer his theories concerning ESP, but later it would become deeply involved in early research into entheogens, specifically magic mushrooms, in the 1950s. Alice Bouverie was deeply involved in this aspect of the research as well, as was noted before here.

Alice Bouverie
On New Years Eve 1952 Puharich conducted a seance in which he channeled entities that referred to themselves as The Nine. These beings claimed to be extraterrestrials who had transcended space and time. Puharich conducted another seance to invoke The Nine in 1953 that Bouverie participated in.

And here we find that less than a decade later her distant relative Lord William Waldorf Astor II appears to have been conducting his own curious rituals at the family estate of Cliveden. Clearly, the Astor family had developed some strange interests by at least the 1950s.

Lord Astor was not Ward's only high society friend with curious interests either. There was also J. Paul Getty Jr., the son of the American oil tycoon from Texas.
"Ward knew the oil baron's executive assisting Claus von Bulow – real name Claus Borberg – a Danish aristocrat whose functions for Getty reportedly included obtaining a supply of 'rejuvenation' drugs and organising parties. Getty, a relentless womaniser, once boasted of having had sex with five women in a single day."
(The Secret Worlds of Stephen Ward, Anthony Summers & Stephen Dorril, pg. 192) 
J. Paul Getty Jr. and wife Talitha Pol
Several years after the Profumo affair blew up, Getty would become one of the chief financial patrons of infamous filmmaker and occultist Kenneth Anger. Anger was a devotee of Aleister Crowley and his films often featured occultic and fascist themes. In the wake of the relative success of 1963's Scorpio Rising, Getty brought Anger to the UK where he quickly made in roads among high society:
"The screenings also opened up new streams of finance, as younger heirs to foundational American fortunes became entranced with the burgeoning hippie movement and wanted to participate, or at least invest. One such scion, John Paul Getty Jr., invited Anger to London, where he was scooped up by the demimonde and soon found himself at parties with the art dealer Robert Fraser, hanging with John Lennon and Yoko Ono, and eventually living with Mick Jagger and his girlfriend Marianne Faithfull, and later Keith Richards and his girlfriend Anita Pallenberg. Both couples soon became interested in the occult movement and devil worship, dabbling in it to the extent that Anger’s teachings pushed them to record a new song called 'Sympathy for the Devil,' with new converts Faithfull and Pallenberg singing backup."
Anger would go on to make his most famous film, Lucifer Rising, several years later. Initially set to feature a soundtrack by Led Zeppelin's Jimmy Page, the film starred Mansonite and convicted murderer Bobby Beausoleil (who ultimately did the soundtrack, from prison, as well). Anger is now widely considered to be an icon of underground and gay cinema, the inventor of the "Midnight Movie," an an enormous influence on the then-emerging 1960s counterculture.

Kenneth Anger
The scion of at least one other wealthy and powerful American family that would play a key role in bank rolling the American counterculture also appears to have been a part of Ward's circle. His name was William Mellon Hitchcock, whose name should be familiar to those of you who have been following this series. As was noted in the examination of Resorts International, "Mr. Billy" (as Hitchcock was known to his family and friends) had been an early investor in Resorts' Paradise Island casino.

Around the time of Profumo affair going public, Mr. Billy had hooked up with Timothy Leary and had opened up his estate at Millbrook to Leary's psychedelic evangelicalism. Mr. Billy would later become the banker for the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, which by the end of the 1960s had become the largest LSD syndicate in the world. To say that Mr. Billy played an enormous role in the spread of LSD would be an understatement. And given the curious interests of the Astor and Getty families, he would have certainly been in receptive company. More on Mr. Billy's role in the Profumo scandal will be noted in a moment so do keep him in mind.

Before moving along, it is worth noting one final reputed member of Ward's circle: Mary Ann MacLean, more commonly known as Mary Ann De Grimston. Along with her husband Robert, Mary Ann founded the infamous Process Church of the Final Judgment, the cult that has long been linked to the Manson and Son of Sam killings. It should be noted though that no compelling evidence has emerged linking Mary Ann to the Profumo scandal and former Process member (and apologist) Timothy Wylie is quick to dismiss such notions:
"It's been suggested in some recent articles that Mary Ann might have had some involvement with the Profumo affair, the sex scandal that brought down a cabinet minister and the conservative government. Before I joined The Process I bumped into Christine Keeler, one of the two call girls called as witnesses, who had heard nothing of Mary Ann. Besides, I'm perfectly certain that had she played a part in the scandal she'd have been only too ready to tell us all about it."
(Love Sex Fear Death, Timothy Wylie, pg. 55)
the infamous Mary Ann De Grimston
As I noted above, there really is nothing compelling to link Mary Ann De Grimston to Profumo and I only mention it because the reputed cult behind the Manson and Son of Sam killings will be addressed at length in a future installment of this saga. What's more, Mary Ann may have had very compelling reasons for keeping her ties to Ward highly secretive. For we shall see, Profumo didn't just bring down a British government, it also almost brought down an American presidency as well.

But even if Mary Ann had nothing to do with Profumo, it cannot be denied that the circle around Stephen Ward would play an enormous role in funding the American counterculture and later New Age movement. The Astor, Getty and Mellon families were all among the most prominent financial backers and here they are, engaged in bizarre sex parties featuring key members of a Conservative British government. But moving along.


The American Players

Before getting into Corbally's role in Profumo, I now need to address some of the intrigues playing out within the American deep state. Let us begin with Roy Cohn's patron, longtime FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. Hoover ruled over the Federal Bureau of Investigation with the power few dictators enjoy, making it his own person fiefdom for decades. And like his protege, Hoover was an untouchable figure in Washington because of his proficiency in sexual blackmail. Hoover's Official and Confidential Files have become the stuff of legend.

The only real challenge Hoover faced during long tenure was mounted by the Kennedy brothers, but most especially Robert. RFK had become increasingly disillusioned with Hoover during the McClellan hearings, feeling increasingly that the director had been stonewalling him. Upon JFK's election, RFK took over the Justice Department and mounted the nation's first semi-serious war on organized crime. In the process, his disillusionment with the director of the FBI only grew and there were increasing rumblings that the Kennedy brothers would soon move against him.

Hoover has long been alleged to have protected the mob from seriously scrutiny because it had obtained sexual blackmail on Hoover. While this blackmail material may have existed since the 1930s, there are allegations that Roy Cohn, a longtime attorney for the mob, was regularly engaging Hoover in compromising activities by the late 1950s. These activities also involved Lewis Rosenstiel, the mob connected founder of Schenley Industries and a close friend of both Cohn and Hoover. It was Lewis' wife Susan who made the allegations.
"... During 1958 Susan Rosenstiel insists that she was dragged by her husband to the infamous get-together hosted by Roy Cohn in 'a beautiful suite... all done in light blue' at the Plaza in Manhattan at which the Director the FBI confronted her in false eyelashes and a black wig, his short legs crossed demurely beneath his fluffy hemline. A follow-up orgy allegedly featured the Director in a feathered boa, involved with a couple of sleek young street hustlers in a maneuver requiring – this was squeamish old Hoover, after all – rubber gloves!"
(Bobby and J. Edgar, Burton Hersh, pg. 87)
J. Edgar Hoover
While these allegations have been widely dismissed, even by some of Hoover's harshest critics, there is circumstantial evidence Cohn was up to something very unsettling at the Plaza during the late 1950s.
"One corroboratory sidelight turned up one New York attorney John Koltz began to investigate Roy Cohn on behalf of a client. Declassified New York government files and spadework by a private detective substantiated the allegation that there was indeed a 'blue suite' at the Plaza, Suite 233. 'Roy Cohn was providing protection,' Koltz discovered. 'There were a bunch of pedophiles involved. That's where Cohn got his power from – blackmail.' Like scorpions investigating coitus, Roy Cohn and J. Edgar Hoover would continue to circle each other with wary fascination for decades."
(Bobby and J. Edgar, Burton Hersh, pg. 88)
There are some interesting references to Freemasonry in Cohn's alleged suite at the Plaza. It features the number 33, which is the highest grade in the Scottish Rite. The suite was also described as blue and the most popular variation of Masonry in the US has long been the "blue lodges," which feature only the first three grades. Even more curious, however, is the presence of the number 23 in Cohn's suite. This plays into the 23 enigma. But let us return to the matter at hand.

It seems highly likely that an opening salvo in the feud between Hoover and the Kennedy brothers involved the RFK-led Justice Department's attack on Roy Cohn.
"With John Kennedy president, Cohn sensed a hardening of the atmosphere. He rang up Jim Juliana, who had worked for him on McCarthy committee before signing on with Bobby. Should Cohn be concerned? Let's put it this way, Juliana warned him, 'Hoffa's number one. You're number two. Get out of town.'...
"... Before long Cohn heard that a ten-man team of tax investigators had been detached from the IRS to dig through Cohn's affairs, the 'Get-Cohn Squad.' It was soon evident to Cohn that an extraordinary barrage of covert methodology – mail cover, wiretaps, undistinguished physical surveillance – was starting to pound in, coordinated by the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District Roberts Morgenthau..."
(Bobby and J. Edgar, Burton Hersh, pg. 390)
Roy Cohn
As was noted in part three of this series, Cohn and RFK had first run afoul of one another during the McCarthy hearings, but Cohn's close ties to Hoover likely made him an even more appealing target once the Kennedy brothers had assumed power. By 1963, when the Profumo affair broke, there was quite a scorpion duel unfolding between Hoover and the Kennedy brothers.
"... In the 1950s, Meyer Lansky, and other mob figures such as Sam Giancana, supplied women to John F. Kennedy, some of whom were logged into Hoover's growing files of dirt on the young senator. In the 1960s this deep-political equilibrium was threatened by Robert Kennedy's war on organized crime, which alienated Hoover. Feeling increasingly threatening, especially after the Kennedy's began to collect their own files on Hoover, both Hoover and the mob began to escalate their collection of Kennedy sexual dirt. At first Hoover gained White House influenced by protecting the Kennedys against mob blackmail, but in 1963 Hoover, desperate, began to leak some of his own dirt on Kennedy to the public."
(Deep Politics and the Death of JFK, Peter Dale Scott, pg. 228)
Fortunately for Hoover, Cohn's close associate Thomas Corbally had made some interesting discoveries in the UK of late.


Enter Corbally

Corbally first encountered Stephen Ward at some point towards the end of 1962, allegedly. In Corbally's version, the two men were at a party. Corbally was having trouble with his knee from an old injury and Ward, an osteopath, treated him on the spot. From there they soon became fast friends, with Corbally alleging that at one point Ward was visiting his flat at least twice day to treat the knee. 

It is likely there was nothing chance about this encounter. In June of 1963, after Corbally had fled the UK in the wake of the scandal unfolding, he told the FBI that he had heard allegations of the Profumo affairs as far back as 1961. These were not the only claims Ward was making that interested Corbally either. Writing on BuzzFeed, Eamon Javers notes:
"... Ward liked to tell people he had been a back-channel intermediary between the Soviets and the British government during the Cuban missile crisis. 'He knew a lot of pretty girls,' Corbally told the author Anthony Summers. 'And I like pretty girls. He liked to gossip and talked incessantly about the things he knew … I entertained a lot and Stephen was around my flat a lot.' One of the people Ward brought around to Corbally’s flat was the Russian, Yevgeny Ivanov."
Essentially Ward alleged that the UK had used his friendship with Ivanov, a key figure in the Profumo affair, to establish a back channel with the Soviet Union during the height of the Cuban missile crisis. Corbally told the FBI that he had been advised that this claim was accurate. Corbally then appears to have had an interest in Ward's dealings for at least a year before the two men met.

Stephen Ward
 One is thus left with the distinct impression that Corbally was involved in some type of intelligence gathering operation that ultimately led him to Ward. But plying Ward for information on the goings-on in British high society at the time was hardly the extent of Corbally's activities in the UK at this time. A subsequent FBI report noted that Corbally himself "gave wild parties in his flat" (An Affair of State, Phillip Knightly & Caroline Kennedy, pg. 200). 

This is especially interesting in light of Corbally's flatmate: 
"Sharing Corbally's London apartment was another American, William 'Billy' Hitchcock IV, grandson of the founder of Gulf Oil and a nephew of the immensely wealthy Mellon family. His monthly income was estimated at $100,000, an extraordinary sum in those days. Some of that money went to financing drug guru Timothy Leary's project to spread LSD use worldwide."
 (The Secret Worlds of Stephen Ward, Anthony Summers & Stephen Dorril, pg. 249)
Mr. Billy is on the right
Mr. Billy would begin bankrolling Leary in 1963, months after his role in the Profumo affair would come to a close. Thus, Mr. Billy was sharing a flat in London by at least 1962 with Thomas Corbally, a former OSS and military intelligence officers long reputed to maintained ties with the CIA over the years and a close friend of far right luminary Roy Cohn. Corbally's own political ideology was considered quite conservative as well. 

Nonetheless, Corbally appears to have been running orgies out of this flat that involved Stephen Ward and the same circle of British aristocrats caught up in the Profumo affair. And in the aftermath Mr. Billy, a scion of the deeply intelligence-connected Mellon clan (noted before here), begins bankrolling Timothy Leary. And as noted above, eventually Mr. Billy would end up as the financier for the largest LSD smuggling ring in the world while simultaneously serving as an investor in Resorts International. The same Resorts International Roy Cohn's good friend and frequent client Donald Trump would end up as CEO of in 1987. While I've found no indication that Mr. Billy and Trump knew one another, both men shared at last one common friend: Thomas Corbally.

Thomas Corbally
But I'm getting ahead of myself. Let us return to the Corbally/Hitchcock flat for a moment. All of this is highly suggestive of some type of intelligence operation being run by both men and subsequent events appear to bare this out. For you see, it would be Corbally and Hitchcock who would ultimately confirm the Profumo affair to Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, whose government would be brought down by it.

Macmillan had been hearing rumblings about the affair for months, but in January of 1963 he turned to a most curious source to confirm or deny them. 
"Macmillan's closest American friends was the ambassador, David Bruce, a great Anglophile, with whom he lunched regularly at Bucks Club. Macmillan had been hearing rumors about Profumo and Keeler since November the previous year. He had begun to suspect that his own advisers were not telling him the truth about the affair, either because they were involved in it themselves, or they were trying to cover up to avoid a scandal. So at one of his lunches with Bruce, the Prime Minister asked the ambassador to make discreet inquiries to see what he could discover.
"Bruce went to Thomas Corbally, the American businessman who was a friend of Ward. Bruce knew of this friendship from his nephew, Billy Mellon Hitchcock, the cousin of Center Hitchcock, the American who had taken Mandy Rice-Davies to Paris three months earlier. Corbally recalls, 'Ambassador Bruce asked me to find out what was going on and to let him know as quickly as possible. I telephoned Ward from Bruce's office and arranged a lunch --Ward, me, the ambassador's secretary Alfred Wells, and Billy Hitchcock.
" 'The lunch was held upstairs at Simpson's in Piccadilly in a booth where, we hoped, none of us would be recognised. There Ward told Wells the full story, including Christine's dealings with the newspapers and the letter from Profumo she had kept which made clear her relationship with him.' "
(An Affair of State, Phillip Knightly & Caroline Kennedy, pg. 157)
In The Secret Worlds of Stephen Ward, Anthony Summers and Stephen Dorril give a slightly different chain of events. In their account, Ward confessed the affair to Hitchcock and Corbally on January 28th or 29th of 1963, at which point Mr. Billy promptly contacted his uncle, David Bruce, who had married into the Mellon family. Corbally was then asked to visit the ambassador, who was also quite friendly with Lord Astor and who had visited Cliveden previously, the next day. Bruce asked Corbally to get to the bottom of the matter. This led to the meeting with Ward that included Corbally, Hitchcock and Alfred Wells, Bruce's secretary, on February 13th.

David Bruce
As such, it is possible, maybe even probable, that it was Corbally and Hitchcock who formally blew the whistle on the Profumo/Keeler/Ivanov triangle. This is again highly suggestive of an intelligence agenda on the part of Corbally and Hitchcock, a possibly further bolstered by the fact that they turned to Hitchcock's uncle, US Ambassador David Bruce. 

For you see, in addition to being a member of the Mellon family, Bruce, like Corbally, was also an OSS veteran (noted before here). As such, it is quite possible Bruce and Corbally already knew each other or were at least aware of one another before the Profumo affair. What's more, this further indicates an intelligence operation as two of the three Americans initially involved in investigating the scandal on the American side were OSS veterans while the third, Mr. Billy, was related to Bruce and part of a family with extensive intelligence connections (noted before here). 

What happened next in regards to how Bruce's office handled then information they received from Corbally is a matter of much debate.
"What then of Ambassador Bruce himself? Did he or his office brief Prime Minister Macmillan in late January, as indicated by the FBI's dossier? A State Department document, an 'Eyes Only' report from Ambassador Bruce to President Kennedy sent in June 1963, offers more food for thought. It reads: 'Few people believe that Macmillan, whose private integrity has never been questioned, would have connived at a clumsy attempt to avoid an almost inevitable disclosure if he had known that Profumo had lied. Nor would it consort with the character of the PM to have done so.'
"How to explain this message, if Bruce had been given information on the Profumo case as early as January? How to explain it if, as memories of others and the file indicates, he had ordered his assistant Wells to investigate, and if Wells had informed the Prime Minister's office of what Corbally and his friend had learned from Ward, then what Wells learned directly from Ward – weeks before Profumo repeated his lie to Parliament?
"We examined not only Bruce's papers as released by the State Department, but also his journals, preserve since his death by the Virginia Historical Society. Bruce kept a meticulous record of each day's activity, down to comments on people he spoke with or met – even details of food served at dinner. The journal is almost pedantically detailed, and the entries for 28 and 29 January – when the Ambassador or his office supposedly told the Prime Minister's office what it had just learned – contain no mention of Profumo. Oddly, though, an entire page is missing from the journal at the relevant point. There is no way of knowing whether it once contained material on a tip-off to Prime Minister Macmillan.
"It may be no coincidence that, in the FBI dossier as released, Ambassador Bruce's response to a report of the FBI's interview with Corbally also turns out to be missing. So is a letter on the subject to Secretary of State Dean Rusk. The FBI files indicate, moreover, that the original information given to Ambassador Bruce was not even passed to the State Department in Washington. It seems possible, therefore, that – until the case became public – Bruce simply decided to sit on it."
(The Secret Worlds of Stephen Ward, Anthony Summers & Stephen Dorril, pgs. 254-255)
In addition to the allegations that Bruce notified Macmillan of the affair, Corbally also reportedly briefed Clive Bossom, a British government official, on what he had uncovered. At the time Bossom was the Secretary of State for Air, a post somewhat akin to the United States Secretary of the Air Force, but a cabinet level position in the British government nonetheless.

Clive Bossom
And yet neither Corbally, Bruce or Hitchcock appear to have briefed any branch of the US government on these allegations until nearly June of 1963. When Corbally did talk, he approached Hoover's FBI, who in turn appear to have quietly conducted their own investigation without notifying the rest of the government of a scandal that could bring down the government of a crucial US alley. 

When the scandal finally broke in the press, the Kennedy White House appears to have called an emergency meeting that featured the Secretary of Defense, the directors of the CIA and DIA and an Assistant Director of the FBI on June 20, 1963. That meeting remains heavily censored to this day and there are strong indications that the Kennedy White House was totally out of the loop in regards to what Corbally, Bruce and Hitchcock had uncovered in the UK.

Why would Corbally and company go to such lengths to block their investigation from the Kennedy White House while working with the UK government?  And why was the Kennedy White House in turn so concerned when the scandal broke? Why did JFK initially meet with his Defense Secretary and various key figures in the US intelligence community before consulting with the State Department, which seemingly should have been who was first approached?

Is it because of a realization than an intelligence operation outside the purvey of the mainline US government had turned up something damning to the White House? All these questions and much more will be addressed in a future installment. Until then, stay tuned dear reader.



Goodfellas Part VII: Jack and Bobby

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Welcome to the seventh installment in my "Goodfellas" series. When I began this project in November of 2017 it was intended to explore the ties between President Donald J. Trump and organized crime. But over the preceding months it has taken on a life of its own, now encompassing the network (cult?) behind Trump's rise to power. For those of you just joining us, here is a brief recap of what has already been addressed:

The project began with a standalone piece that considered Trump's links to Resorts International, a notorious gaming interest with extensive ties to both organized crime and the US deep state. Beginning as the Mary Carter Paint Company in the early 1960s, the company was widely believed to be a CIA front used for anti-Castro operations in Florida during that era. By the end of the decade Mary Carter had become Resorts and had established its own little gaming fiefdom on the Bahamas' Paradise Island. Important early backers included billionaire Howard Hughes, President Richard M. Nixon, "rogue" financiers such as Robert Vesco and Richard Mellon Hitchcock and the inevitable Lansky lackeys. Resorts also established Intertel, it own private intelligence agency that was heavily staffed by "former" US operators, around this time.

Trump eventually became Resorts CEO in 1987. The gaming interest had most recently played a key role in opening up Atlantic City to legalized gambling as it had in the Bahamas during the prior decade. Intertel and the mob were still in league with Resorts at this time as well, giving the Orange One quite a rogue's gallery of collaborators.


In many ways Trump's CEO-ship of Resorts represented a kind of coming out party. As was noted in the first installment of this series, Trump had spent much of the prior decade cultivating contacts among organized crime circles prior to taking over Resorts. In the second and third installments I suggested that one such contact Trump made in the late 1970s involved "The Company," a drugs and arms trafficking network launched by former police and US military personnel in Kentucky during the late 1970s. Various members of "The Company" boasted of CIA links and appear to have had extensive contacts within the administration of Kentucky governor John Y. Brown. Trump himself befriended Brown during this time and became a regular on the Kentucky Derby scene, along with the Clinton family.

As I was wrapping up part three I began to consider the man who initiated Trump into this netherworld, former McCarthy attorney Roy Cohn. Cohn is widely credited as Trump's political mentor. He introduced the Orange One to many individuals who would become key figures in Trump's quest for the White House, most notably Rupert Murdoch, Paul Manafort and Roger Stone. Cohn also had extensive ties to organized crime, the US intelligence community, the Fascist International (personified by networks such as the American Security Council, the World Anti-Communist League and Le Cercle) and a deep seated rivalry with the Kennedy family.

During the fourth installment I began to consider Cohn's source of power: sexual blackmail. There Cohn's ties to CIA director William Casey, Republican lobbyists Robert Keith Gray Craig Spence and other key figures in the infamous Franklin scandal were considered. For those of you unaware, Franklin was believed to be a nationwide pedophile ring based out of Nebraska that thrived during the Reagan/Bush years. And Cohn appears to have been very close to several key figures involved in it.


Part five introduced another close Cohn/Trump collaborator who has appeared in various sex scandals for decades: private detective Thomas Corbally. Corbally, a veteran of both the OSS (the predecessor to the CIA) and Kroll Associates, was believed to have had a decades-spanning association with the US intelligence community. Corbally was last in the midst of scandal during the early 1990s when he cropped up in the fallout from Hollywood madam Heidi Fleiss. Corbally had already been active in Hollywood for decades by that point collecting dirt.

But Hollywood was hardly the extent of Corbally's activities. As was noted at the end of that installment and throughout the most recent one, Corbally was a key figure in the Profumo scandal that brought down the Macmillan government in the UK during the early 1960s. The scandal revolved around a woman named Christine Keeler who slept with British Secretary of State for War John Profumo and Soviet naval attache and GRU asset Yevgeni Ivanov during 1961 at the behest of Stephen Ward, an asset of MI5 and likely MI6 as well. Later Ward would be used as a back channel to the Soviet Union by the UK during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

At the center of things was the estate of Cliveden, then controlled by Astor family, a long time powerhouse within the Anglo-American Establishment. It had been the British wing of the Astor family that had done so much to launch the Round Table movement that spawned the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and the Royal Institute of International Affairs around the time of the First World War. During the build up to the Second World War Cliveden had served as meeting ground for members of this network that supported appeasement with Nazi Germany. This circle became known as the "Cliveden Set."

Cliveden
By the early 1960s the social circle surrounding Cliveden was even more curious, as were the activities taking place there. As to the latter, it would appear that Ward (among others) was providing girls for orgies with occultic undertones. Ward himself was reputed to have an interest in the occult and he would hardly have been the only one. The Astor family itself, and especially the American wing, had developed quite an interest in esoteric and fringe topics by this time. Their circle would come to include J. Paul Getty Jr., eventual patron of Crowleyite and cult filmmaker Kenneth Anger, and William Mellon Hitchcock, heir of the powerful and intelligence-connected Mellon family of Pittsburgh. Shortly after his time at Cliveden Hitchcock became the patron of LSD guru Timothy Leary and eventually the financier for the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, the largest LSD smuggling network in the world by the end of the 1960s.

In other words, this circle appears to have had an enormous influence on the American counterculture that would emerge by the late 1960s, bankrolling several of its key cultural foundations. Even more ominously are the longstanding rumors that Mary Ann DeGrimston, a co-founder of the infamous Process Church of the Final Judgment, was one of the girls Ward procured for this circle. Another curious tie to the Process, not mentioned in this series previously, is that in the wake of Lord Astor's death in 1966 Cliveden was turned over to Stanford University on a 21-year lease reportedly to improve Anglo-American relations. As I'm sure many of you are aware, Stanford would play a crucial role in Maury Terry's highly controversial account of the Process. But I'm getting ahead of myself. Let us return to the Profumo affair, specifically Thomas Corbally's role in it.


Honey Trapping a President

As was noted at the end of the sixth installment, Corbally appears to have learned of the Ward ring in '61 and sought to befriend Ward not long afterwards. By 1962 the two men had reportedly become quite close. When rumblings of the affair began to emerge in 1963, Corbally, along with future LSD baron William Mellon Hitchcock, appear to have been dispatched by US Ambassador to the UK David Bruce (who had married into the Mellon family) to get to the bottom of things. In some accounts, it was Bruce himself (using information dug up by Corbally and Hitchcock) to first confirm the affair to UK Prime Minister Harold Macmillan.

However Bruce, who like Corbally had served in the OSS during WWII, did not appear to pass along what he learned to Washington at the time. When news of the affair broke in June of 1963, the Kennedy White House seems to have gone into a panic. For all sakes and purposes, it appears that Bruce, Corbally and Hitchcock were running a private intelligence operation the Kennedy White House was totally unaware of. This came at time when Attorney General Robert Kennedy was at war with Roy Cohn and his patron, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. And that is where things stood as I left off.

The panic the Kennedy White House was feeling almost surely derived from the fact that hints were being dropped that JFK himself had been ensnared in this ring and that Hoover was the one leaking this particular entrapment to the press.
"Hoover's sexual dirt on the Kennedys began to surface in late June 1963, after the President's 'peace speech' at American University with its appeal, 'Let us reexamine our attitude towards the Cold War.' On June 20, the United States and the Soviet Union signed an agreement establishing a 'hot line' between the Kremlin and White House. A week later, there was a flurry of veiled hints linking the President to the Profumo story, such as the Drew Pearson-Jack Anderson column for June 29: 'Britishers who read American criticisms of Profumo throwback to question "What high American official was involved with Marilyn Monroe?" '
"On the same day, in a front-page story, the Hearst paper in New York, the Journal-American, linked the Christine Keeler-Stephen Ward sex ring itself to a 'high U.S. aide,' 'one of the biggest names in American politics.' Back in 1960, after his election but before his inauguration, the President had slept with two members of the ring, including Mariella Novotny (a former stripper in London's Club Pigalle)."
(Deep Politics and the Death of JFK, Peter Dale Scott, pgs. 228-229)
J. Edgar Hoover
These trysts appear to have occurred in New York City in December of 1960. Mariella Novotny ended up in New York City as a result of a sex party she had attended earlier that year. It was at this particular party where she first met Stephen Ward and was shortly thereafter asked to travel to NYC to effectively work as an upscale prostitute. It is interesting to note that the party that brought Ward and Novotny together and paved the way for her time in NYC was thrown by American oilman, filmmaker and A & P supermarket heir Huntington Hartford.

Curiously, a year or so prior to this faithful party, Hartford began to invest heavily in a certain island in the Bahamas.
"....Between 1959 and 1965 the eccentric heir poured $28,000,000 into Hog's 685 acres, renaming the island Paradise. Whatever its name, it was proving to be a financial catastrophe: removed from the Nassau mainland by four hundred yards of water, the island was an awkward place to visit and, once you got there, there wasn't much to do the couldn't be done better somewhere else. What the island needed was a tourist attraction – gambling – and a bridge connect it with Nassau proper. Hartford, however, was in no position to obtain permission for either...
"While Groves and Lansky prospered a few miles to the north, Hartford watched in horror as his own investment, bolstered by additional millions, withered in value until the multimillionaire found himself without the cash to continue. Accordingly, he sought a buyer, and found one in the Mary Carter Paint Company."
(Spooks, Jim Hougan, pgs. 380-381)
Huntington Hartford
Yes dear reader, that would be the same Mary Carter Paint Company that eventually became Resorts International. In other words, Huntington Hartford was the man who developed Paradise Island prior to Resorts moving in to launch their infamous casino there. Hartford would retain a stake in the island and, as Hougan later notes, became a shareholder in Resorts.

Thus, Ward's social circle included two future shareholders in Resorts --Hartford and William Mellon Hitchcock --the gaming interest that Trump eventually became CEO of 1987. And here they are in the early 1960s involved in a sex ring being managed MI5 and unknown American partners targeting powerful political figures in the US and UK, including JFK. But moving along.

The other woman linked to JFK in this ring was Suzy Chang. Its possible Kennedy affair with Chang had begun even earlier, during the 1960 election campaign. In some accounts Novotny's affair with Kennedy is said have resulted from her "filling in" for Chang in NYC. There is little doubt that Chang had both powerful backers and was close to several key figures in this scandal, most notably Ward and Corbally.
"This heavily censored FBI and US Immigration Service documents reveal that Chang traveled to New York in 1960 and 1961, and over the Christmas period of 1962. Earlier in 1962, she applied to get on to the Chinese visa quota for the United States. Chang's mother, who was already living in America, filed a petition to the Immigration Service on her daughter's behalf. He did so through the prestigious New York law firm of Donovan Leisure Newton & Irvine. William Donovan, who started the firm, had been the founder of the OSS, the precursor of the CIA, and the law firm had always had strong connections with the government in power.
"This was a surprisingly powerful helping hand for a minor actress. 'Someone,' a former FBI official told us, 'was protecting her ass. They wanted someone with real clout to carry the ball, to run interference for her...' Suzy Chang got on to the visa quota within a fortnight.
"A 19 July 1963 report in the Immigration Service file – soon after the flap over the Journal-American article hinting at the President's involvement in the Profumo case – reflects an extensive investigation of Chang. The report lists nine people, most of them British models, who had been linked to Chang. All the names are blanked out. Another document shows that the authorities had combed to the file on Mariella Novotny prostitution case, looking for a connection to Chang. They did not find one.
"The most suggestive document is dated well after the Profumo case, in 1965. It notes that Chang 'arrived in the US at New York via flight 701, on 22/12/63. She was the [blanked-out section in report]... she was question regarding the "Profumo affair," and alleged to be a close friend of Stephen Ward.'
"As this book went into its first edition, the authors finally traced Suzy Chang, who had taken a new name and lived on the eastern seaboard of the United States. She confirmed that she had known many celebrities, including Anthony Armstrong-Jones and key figures associated with the Profumo affair – notably Thomas Corbally, who played a leading role in alerting the American ambassador in London to looming scandal, Kennedy, and Stephen Ward."
(The Secret Worlds of Stephen Ward, Anthony Summers & Stephen Dorril, pgs. 308-309) 
William "Wild Bill" Donovan, the OSS founder whose law firm aided Chang
Earlier Summers and Dorril had also noted that William Mellon Hitchcock was chummy with Chang as well, describing her as "one of Stephen's girls" (pg. 308). As such, it would clearly seem that Corbally and Hitchcock, who shared a flat in the UK together in the early 1960s, were aware that Ward's ring had ensnared JFK in addition to various key figures among the British Tories. And both men reportedly held orgies out of their flat during this time as well, only increasing the amount of sexual blackmail material available to them.

Clearly, it would seem that Corbally and Hitchcock were running some type of honeytrap in the UK shortly before the Profumo affair was exposed. There were even rumblings from journalists at the time that this was the case:
"On 10 June, in the United States, a crack appeared in the wall of silence. The New York Daily News, reporting from London, said US officials were sure the women around Ward were 'only part of a bigger set-up with American ramifications.' It was a reference to the prostitution case, two years earlier, of Harry Towers and Mariella Novotny – the young woman who had claimed following her return to Britain, that one of the men she had had sex with was the man who was now president, John F. Kennedy. The News now further reported that there was 'an American-based organization' attempting, through vice rings, to blackmail 'influential people'.
"The London correspondent who had filed this story, Henry Maule, told labor MP George Wigg – who was still energetically collecting information – that he had been pursuing the story for many months, and had been looking especially into the activities of the wealthy American Thomas Corbally. Corbally, according to Maule, had made a practice of finding out the names of men been associated with Rice-Davies and Keeler for the purposes of blackmail. Maule also brought up Harry Towerss name, and that of another American who, he said, had left the country. His information, he told me, was coming from reliable sources."
(The Secret Worlds of Stephen Ward, Anthony Summers & Stephen Dorril, pg. 291)
Thomas Corbally
The New York Daily News' investigation into Profumo would be a brief one. Shortly after the newspaper linked Corbally publicly to the story, he threatened a million-dollar lawsuit. The story then promptly died at the Daily News, but was then taken up by the Journal-American. The Journal-American was at the time owned by the far right Hearst family, who were close to Hoover. It is believed that Hoover himself would at times use the Journal-American for leaks and this seems to be very much the case in this instance.
"He had long used the Journal-American, like other Hearst papers, to fuel fears about the Red Menace. There were even former FBI men on the paper's staff. Edgar's phone logs showed that he talked regularly with Richard Berlin, head of the Hearst conglomerate. Berlin oversaw an editorial policy of fierce opposition to the policies of the Kennedy administration.
"He and Edgar, moreover, were both close to Roy Cohn, who was acting as attorney for an American involved in the Profumo case and said by a central figure in the scandal to have 'arranged sex parties for JFK in London.' A telltale handwritten note on one of the FBI's Profumo documents reads: 'Roy Cohn has this info.' "
(Official and Confidential, Anthony Summers, pg. 309) 
The Journal-American, learning from the mistakes of the Daily News, hinted at Kennedy involvement in Profumo while leaving out Corbally or any blackmail angle. The Daily News shall make at least one other appearance is this strange saga, so do keep it in mind dear reader. For now, let us return to Corbally and allegations that he was digging up sexual blackmail material on JFK as he is almost surely the American indicated in the above quote believed who "arranged sex parties for JFK in London."

There are indications that Corbally had made other attempts to set Kennedy up with various women prior to cozying up to Stephen Ward's ring. Eamon Javers, the closet thing we have to a Corbally biographer, noted that the private detective had personally tried to talk at least one actress into sleeping with JFK in 1962, Writing on Buzzfeed, Javers noted:
"In January 1962, Corbally was in Palm Beach, Florida, hanging out with an 18-year-old actor named Nancy Czar. Czar was promoting her new beach-blanket movie Wild Guitar and newly single after a relationship with Elvis Presley.
"As Czar (now Nancy Bretzfield and living in Los Angeles) remembers it, she, Corbally, and a few friends ended up at the Kennedy compound: the Mediterranean-style mansion on North Ocean Boulevard that the rest of the country knew as the Winter White House. Czar told me that during the party Corbally tried to set her up alone with President Kennedy in the library, even as the first lady entertained guests in another room."
Nancy Czar
Czar turned Corbally down, but it would seem by the end of the year Corbally had come into contact with at least one woman who had carried on an affair with the president. Not long afterwards, the leaks to the press started in earnest.


Deep Implications

It thus seems clear that Corbally was a key figure in a blackmail ring that had targeted President Kennedy during the early 1960s. And it seems equally clear that Corbally was taking orders from his attorney, Roy Cohn. It was Cohn who had threatened that million-dollar (in some accounts, six-million dollar) lawsuit against the Daily News on Corbally's behalf and it was Roy Cohn who served as Corbally's attorney when he met with the FBI after fleeing the UK in in June of 1963.
"... It is clear, though, that the FBI was keenly interested in hearing from Thomas Corbally, the American citizen who – as reported earlier – had given information on the case to the US embassy in London. Corbally was now back in the United States, and gave information both directly to the FBI and through his attorney Roy Cohn. Much of the information he gave to Roy Cohn is still classified today."
(The Secret Worlds of Stephen Ward, Anthony Summers & Stephen Dorril, pg. 288)
Think about that for a moment dear reader --the information Corbally told Cohn regarding a sex scandal in the UK was so sensitive that its still classified over a half century later. Clearly, Cohn was in possession of some truly bombshell revelations. And such information likely couldn't have come at a better time.

Roy Cohn
As was noted in the prior installment, RFK had brought the full force of the Justice Department to bare against Cohn during the early 1960s. RFK was effectively in a stealth civil war with Cohn and his longtime patron, J. Edgar Hoover. Hoover, being aware of JFK's indiscretions with Judith Campbell and Marilyn Monroe, was already somewhat protected, but Cohn does not appear to have had an insurance policy until Profumo. What's more, Profumo would have been far more damaging to JFK than affairs with either Campbell or Monroe. Soviet and British intelligence were also at work in Profumo in addition to the hints of occultism and the fact that many of the women used in this ring were barely legal (and in some cases, still minors when they started). Profumo was essentially full blown Eyes Wide Shutand could have easily brought down both governments in the US and the UK.

But in addition to Kennedy, it is likely Cohn and his allies in the American far right saw it as an opportunity for some house cleaning across the Atlantic. At the time the British Conservative Party, as was indicated in part five of this series, was still heavily influenced by Lord Astor and other Round Table fellow travelers. It would seem that Profumo took out many globalists and paved the way for a much more conservative approach from the Tories that became evident by the early 1970s with the launch of the far right Monday Club. As was noted before here, many Tories used the Monday Club to forge ties with Le Cercle and other components of the Fascist International. This transformation would ultimately result in Brexit decades later.

Profumo then provided much needed ammunition to Roy Cohn in his war with RFK while also paving the way for a firm nationalist component in a major political party in a crucial US alley. This was no small feet for Cohn, and several crucial players in the Profumo affair would end up launching Resorts International by the end of the decade, that mysterious gaming interest that would solidify Donald Trump as a major player by the mid-1980s. As such, Profumo was clearly a pivotal event of 20th century deep politics even though it remains shockingly under examined by most alternative researchers.

But in addition to the deep politics, there's also the curious figures in Ward's ring such as the Astor family, William Mellon Hitchcock, Paul Getty Jr. and possibly even Mary Ann DeGrimston that would play such key roles in launching the 1960s counterculture and New Age movements just a few years later. These elements would once again aide Cohn in the late 1970s and early 1980s during a series of shocking murders that unfolded across the United States --murders that appear to have been the work of a well connected and well funded cult. In the next installment we shall consider such things. Stay tuned dear reader.


Goodfellas Part VIII: Sons of Cohn

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Welcome to the eighth and final installment in what has been a long, strange journey. It began in November of 2017 with a standalone piece I published examining the implications of Donald Trump's time as CEO of the gaming company known as Resorts International for a brief period in the 1980s. While often overlooked. Trump's tenure at Resorts was likely a pivotal moment in the Orange One's public life. It effectively announced his arrival as a real player in deep politics.

For you see, Resorts International was not just any gaming interest. It had its origins in an entity known as the Mary Carter Paint Company, widely believed to be a CIA front used to sponsor anti-Castro operations in Florida during the early 1960s. By the end of the decade it had morphed into Resorts and opened up the Bahama's Paradise Island to legalized gambling. It had an assortment of powerful and curious backers that included President Richard M. Nixon, billionaire Howard Hughes, "rogue" financiers Robert Vesco and William Mellon Hitchcock and the inevitable Lansky associates. It also owned its own private intelligence company outright. It was known as Intertel and was heavily staffed with various members of the US intelligence community.

Both the Syndicate and Intertel were still heavily involved in Resorts at the time of Trump's CEO-ship. The two represented the confluence of powers that ultimately brought Trump into the White House.

This present series began as an attempt to trace Trump's ties to organized crime prior to Resorts, with part one focusing on the various wise guys who helped establish Trump's real estate empire in the early days. But at the end of that installment I began to focus on a curious individual known as Edward "Biff" Halloran, an alleged Genovese family member who had ties to an even more curious criminal enterprise.

With the second and third installments I began to consider "The Company," a Kentucky-based drugs-and-arms trafficking network founded and heavily staffed by former US military and law enforcement personnel. "The Company" appears to have had links to both the US intelligence community as well as the administration of Kentucky Governor John Y. Brown. During the heyday of The Company Trump would befriend Brown and become a regular at Caesars Palace, a Las Vegas casino Brown was a shadow owner of and which laundered money for the Company. During this era Trump would also begin making annual pilgrimages to the Kentucky Derby, where Company personnel were providing security for various high society balls held in honor of the race. Other curious types, such as the Clinton family, were making the rounds there as well.

Donald Trump with John Y. Brown as Hillary Clinton looks on
As I was wrapping up part three I began to consider the man widely regarded as Trump's political mentor and the individual who initiated Trump into the criminal underworld: his infamous attorney Roy Cohn. A former legal aide of Joseph McCarthy, Cohn was a major power in New York City with heavy sway over the mob. But beyond this, he was a key member of an international far right network and a vicious foe of the Kennedy family.

With the fourth installment I began to take a closer look at Cohn, noting his close ties to CIA Director William Casey and Republican lobbyists Craig Spence and Robert Keith Gray, all of whom were alleged to be key figures in the Franklin scandal. Said scandal involved a nation wide pedophile ring based out of Nebraska that was linked to the Bush I White House and generally catered to the rich and powerful, almost surely for the purpose of blackmail.

But Franklin was not the only blackmail ring Cohn has been linked too. With part five I began to consider the curious career of Thomas Corbally, a member of both the OSS and Kroll Associates who frequently worked as a private detective for Cohn (and later Trump). Corbally crops up in numerous sex scandals over the years, the most recently involving Heidi Fleiss, the so-called Hollywood madam, during the early 1990s. As the fifth installment was coming to an end I began to consider a far more serious sex scandal Corbally was a central player in: the Profumo affair.

John Profumo was the UK Secretary of State for War and a Privy Council member. In 1961 he had an affair with Christine Keeler, who at the time was also sleeping with Yevgeni Ivanov, a Soviet naval attache and GRU asset then stationed in London. When news of the affair broke in 1963, it brought down the Conservative government of Harold Macmillan.

Christine Keeler
Keeler had been set up with both men by MI5 asset Stephen Ward, who was also reputedly used by the UK as a back channel to the Soviet Union during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Ward's patron was Lord William Astor III, a fellow MI5 man who belonged to one of the most powerful Anglo-American dynasties around. The British branch of the Astor family had played a key role in launching the Round Table movement that spawned the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and the Royal Institute of International Affairs.

As was noted in part six, Ward and Astor appear to have been involved in a curious network of British aristocrats engaged in sex parties with sadomasochistic and occultic overtones. Indeed, Ward himself was said to have a keen interest in the occult and members of this social circle such as J. Paul Getty Jr. and William Mellon Hitchcock (also a later shareholder in Resorts International) would later become major backers of the 1960s counterculture.

Corbally was also a member of this network, sharing a flat with Hitchcock in London at the time. In 1962 he befriended Ward and began learning of the seedier side of the British Establishment while also throwing sex parties at his flat. Reportedly, he is who provided confirmation of the Profumo affair to Macmillan via US Ambassador to the UK David Bruce, another OSS man himself.

But Corbally appears to have had an even more ambitious agenda than gathering dirt on the British Tories. As was noted in part seven, his interest in Ward's ring appears to have derived from allegations that John F. Kennedy had had an affair with at least two of Ward's girls in New York City during 1961. Corbally would eventually befriend one of these girls and provide information on what he had learned to the FBI in 1963. His attorney during these interviews was Roy Cohn, who owed much of his career to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. At the time both men were at war with the Kennedy White House and Corbally's revelations were no doubt most welcome.


The Process, or Lack Therefore Of

But Profumo indicates even more ominous dealings on the part of Cohn and Corbally. As I've stated several times before, Ward's ring was practically full blown Eyes Wide Shut and one of his reputed girls would go on to form a most notorious cult. The woman's name was Mary Ann MacLean (later DeGrimston) and the cult was called the of the Process Church of the Final Judgment.

It should be noted that there is no concrete evidence that Mary Ann was one of Ward's girls. As was noted in part six, former Process member Timothy Wylie rejected this claim outright on the basis the Mary Ann would have boasted of it at some point. Apparently the woman was prone to embellishing her past.

Mary Ann MacLean
But keep in mind, Ward's ring brought down one government in the UK and may have done the same to the Kennedy White House had JFK lived long enough after the scandal broke. Ward himself died during the trail via suicide (which is widely disputed) and several other individuals with knowledge of the ring suffered similar fates. In other words, Mary Ann would have had good reason to keep mum on any work she did for Ward, especially during the 1960s when many figures linked to the ring were still politically active.

Still, evidence of this is rather slim and I've only included it here due to later connections Cohn and Thomas Corbally made in New York City and the surrounding area during the late 1970s. But before getting to that, I need to briefly address some of the longstanding claims surrounding the Process. 

Since the early 1970s there have been allegations, most notably in Ed Sanders' The Family, that the Process was involved with the Manson Family. Both entities were active in San Francisco during 1967 and it is quite possible Manson encountered the group then, as did numerous other individuals. Certainly, there are indication that Manson was influenced by Process literature of the time.


Then, in 1988, journalist Maury Terry published The Ultimate Evil, a highly controversial account that linked the Process not only to Manson, but also the Son of Sam killings and the Cotton Club murder. Later additions also included the Atlanta Child Murders. Terry effectively outlined a nation wide cult network involved not just in murder, but drug and sex trafficking as well.

I've examined Terry's claims at length before in my account of the Process (which can be found here), and while I find much of his raw data compelling, many of his conclusions are highly problematic. To my mind, Terry overemphasized the importance of the Process and other occultic organizations like the Church of Scientology and American branch of the Ordo Templi Orientis (OTO) in this network while almost totally ignoring its ties to the American militia and neo-Nazi undergrounds and the broader Fascist International.

I already noted Manson's ties to the far right at length in a recent post in the wake of the cult leader's death last year. It is highly recommended the reader check out this post as we shall return to several personalities noted in it. As for the Son of Sam cult, Terry makes frequent references to the group's obsession with Nazism and includes in its membership Army veteran and bodybuilder Fred Cowan. A fanatical neo-Nazi, Cowan murdered several of his coworkers at his place of employment on February 14, 1977 in New Rochelle. Cowan was a member of the far right Georgia-based National States' Rights Party (NSRP).

Fred Cowan
Cowan is not the only right wing terrorist the NSRP has produced over the years. Another was Frazier Glenn Miller, another Army veteran and long time FBI informant linked to several murders over four decades. The most notable were the Greensboro massacre and the Overland Park Jewish Community Center shooting.

And then there's NSRP co-founder J.B. Stoner. In 1980 Stoner was convicted on the 1958 bombing of the Bethel Baptist Church (which played a major role in the early Civil Rights movement) and authorities believed that he may have been involved in dozens of other bombings. Stoner also served on the legal team of James Earl Ray, the alleged assassin of Martin Luther King Jr., and some suspect he played a more direct role in the King assassination as well. And Stoner and other NSRP members have also been credibly linked to the Atlanta Child Murders which, as noted above, Terry has also believed were connected to the Son of Sam cult.

Finally, at least one notable NSRP members appears in the Kennedy assassination, as I noted before here. Interestingly, it is noted in a Warren Commission document that Captain Robert K. Brown was also in contact with NSRP in the months leading up to the Kennedy assassination. As was noted in part two of this series, famed mercenary Brown would go on to found Soldier of Fortunemagazine, which was used extensively by The Company to recruit veterans for their operations. Also noted in that installment were allegation that The Company had provided "devil worshipers" with paramilitary training at a massive training compound in Kentucky. But moving along.

Robert K. Brown
The NSRP was almost surely not the only far right organization the cult network Terry proposes was in contact with. Consider the cities Terry cites as major bases of operations for the network: Los Angeles, Houston and two North Dakota cities, Bismarck and Minot. In Terry's thesis, this network was a kind of shoot of the OTO and used occult organizations across the nation.

And while the OTO had a presence in Houston and certainly Los Angeles during this time, the Dakota cities weren't exactly known as New Age meccas, either then or now. There was, however, one especially militant right wing network active near three of the four cities. This would be the Posse Comitatus network, founded by former military intelligence officer Colonel William Potter Gale. As was noted before here, Gale had played a key role in founding what would become in the militia movement during the early 1960s in Southern California and the Posse was something of a prototype of said movement.

This network would eventually reach across the nation and find a particularly militant member in North Dakota: Gordon Kahl, another former military man who famously engaged in a large scale shootout with police in 1983 that made him a hero of the far right. Kahl had founded a Posse chapter in North Dakota during the 1970s and had been very active in promoting it in the area around Bismark and Minot up until the Medina shootout in 1983.

Gordon Kahl
I've been unable to determine if a Posse chapter was active in Houston during this time, but another right wing paramiltarist surely was: Louis Beam, yet another former military man who helped promote the concept of "leaderless resistance" in the militia movement. Beam was involved with a militia in the Houston area during the early 1980s, reportedly using Camp Puller near Houston to train potential members, which included children as young as 8.

Gale, Kahl and Beam were all proponents of Christian Identity "theology," as was J.B. Stoner. All of these individuals were in contact with one another through a nationwide network that has been linked to numerous instances of terrorism over the years, including the Oklahoma City bombing (noted before here).

Christian Identity theology is a thoroughly racist ideology that depicts nonwhites as demonic, subhuman beings. As was noted before here, there is some overlap between Identity theology and that of Charles Manson, another reported cog in this network. Christian Identity grew out of a concept known as British Israelism, which held that the British were descendants of the Lost Tribes of Israel. It is interesting to note that in the early twentieth century, in the UK, there was some overlap between the British Israelists and Christian Scientists, including founder Mary Baker Eddy. Reportedly, Christian Science would later play a key role in the Round Table movement (which was sometimes known as the Milner Group):
"... Christian Science became the religion of the Milner Group after Milner's death. Among others, Nancy Astor and Lord Lothian were ardent supporters of the new belief. Christian Science was part of the atmosphere of Cliveden."
(The Anglo-American Establishment, Carroll Quigley, pg. 70)
The so-called "Cliveden Set," named after the Astor family estate, was an offshoot of the Round Table movement that fought for appeasement with Nazi Germany in the years leading up to World War II. Nancy Astor was the mother of Lord Astor while the Lothain family would later turn up in far right wing pursuits (noted before here). Clivden would later become the site of various sex parties, with Stephen Ward renting a cottage there during the peak of his influence (as was noted in part six). Reportedly Ward and Nancy Astor became quite friendly with one another during this time. But moving along.

Cliveden
Naturally, Maury Terry was totally oblivious to these connections and seemingly so are virtually every other researcher that delved into these murky waters. I can't speak for the rest of the pack, but in Terry's case I feel quite certain that there's a reason he's never chosen to pursue this angle. More on that in a moment.

There's one other point I would also like to make before moving on to the next section as well: the presence of military veterans in this network. Many of the most notorious members of these far right paramilitary organizations were veterans, as were many of the members of The Company. And so were many reputed members of the Son of Sam cult. Beyond Cowan, there was David Berkowitz himself, John Carr (the reported leader of Berkowitz's coven and a some time resident of Minot) and William Mentzer. And these are just the alleged members.

Certainly, it would seem like there is a lot of overlap among these supposedly unconnected networks...


Cohn and Son of Sam

As far as Roy Cohn goes, there has been one noteworthy individual to link the infamous attorney to the Son of Sam cult: David Berkowitz. The allegations come via Maury Terry, so they certainly should be taken with a grain of salt, but are interesting nonetheless.
"According to Berkowitz, the sex and drug soirees were held at upscale private residences in Westchester, Manhattan, Connecticut and Long Island's Hamptons. His telephone records, which documented calls to the Hamptons and to the Long Island summer homes of two Yonkers doctors, partially supported his statement. Further, two witnesses maintain that occasionally present at these parties were a Yonkers judge, at least two Westchester County politicians, a high-ranking New York State politician, a celebrated but later-murdered physician, a Nobel Prize-winning doctor, and two aides (one prominent) to then-mayor of New York City Abraham Beame.
"Berkowitz also revealed that he met Roy Cohn, the powerful and notorious attorney who once represented – besides numerous other 'high-society' clients – are dealer Andrew Crispo and the owners of the glamorous but scandal-ridden Studio 54 discotheque. 
" 'I was at a party at that big house he had in Greenwich [Connecticut],' Berkowitz said of Cohn, who died of AIDS in 1986. 'I didn't know him, but other people did, and that's how I went to a party there.' "
(The Ultimate Evil Maury Terry, pg. 534)
What then are we to make of these claims? Surprisingly, they are more plausible than they may initially seem.

For one, Terry had earlier alleged that these soirees featured underage prostitutes and as was noted in part six, Cohn was reputed to be involved in sex ring involving minors in New York City going back to the 1950s. Specifically, Cohn was said to keep a suite at the Plaza in Manhattan (one of the alleged locations of these parties) for such activities. Would it be a stretch for Cohn to carry on such activities at his Greenwich residence? Certainly his parties there were legendary, with Trump being a frequent guest by the early 1980s.

Cohn's former Greenwich residence
What's more, in addition to hosting sex parties, Westchester County was a the main base of operations for the alleged Son of Sam cult. And it just so happens that Biff Halloran, the Genovese family member who helped Bradley Bryant found The Company (noted in part two) was a resident of Westchester, owning a mansion in Pelham Manor. Halloran was also a client of Cohn and provided Trump with much of the concrete for his early building projects.

And then there's the matter of New York City mayor Abe Beame. Its totally plausible aides of Beame could have attended such parties, especially when they were held at Cohn's home, as Beame was very much a creature of the attorney. In fact, Beame largely owed his office to Cohn.
"The son of a Bronx judge, Cohn was reared in the clubhouse culture of the city, attending dinner parties as a teenager with Carmine DeSapio, Ed Flynn, and the other Democratic bosses who ruled New York. He had also met Abe Beame in his father's house, and over the years became an adviser to both Beame and new Brooklyn Democratic Chairman Meade Esposito. In fact, he played a pivotal role in 1973, when bridesmaid Beame, who was against city comptroller, finally won the mayoral election.
"It was Cohn who privately convinced the New York Times that Beame's leading opponent, Bronx Congressman Mario Biaggi, had taken the Fifth Amendment before a federal grand jury the year before. Cohn happened to know this because Biaggi had come to him for legal advice and told him that he'd refused to testify. When the Times published the charge against Biaggi, with the source cited as anonymous, Biaggi denied it, the testimony was eventually released, and Biaggi's candidacy was destroyed. The gambit made Roy Cohn a fixture in a Beame's government and Beame a trophy at Cohn's frequent parties.
(Trump: The Greatest Show on Earth, Wayne Barrett, pg. 82)
Abe Beame
Abe Beame was the embattled mayor of NYC during the Son of Sam killings. David Berkowitz was arrested in 1977, the year Beame was up for reelection. Beame's administration was riddled with corruption, having lead NYC into a major fiscal crisis. He was trailing badly at the polls when the murders began and would latch onto Sam in a desperate reelection bid.
"Concurrently, New York Mayor Abraham Beame was up for reelection and was trailing badly in the polls as the Sam case heated up. He almost closed a carnivorous gap in the wake of Berkowitz's arrest – with his highly visible portrayal as the man in charge whose police department just happened to end the reign of terror only a month before the primary. But despite his phoenixlike rise from the ashes, Beame narrowly lost that election and was out of office several months later.
"To state the obvious: new mayors initiate high-level changes in large police departments. Thus, many in power had a vested interest in a timely, uncomplicated resolution of the Son of Sam case. But the evidence reveals more than that. It also shows that events were manipulated behind the scenes by a handful of influential individuals who, although not directly involved in the shootings themselves, were compromise because they had interacted with cult leaders at high-society drug parties that featured sex with children."
(The Ultimate Evil, Maury Terry, pg. xiii)
Terry is of course referring to the above-mentioned parties alleged thrown at times at Cohn's Greenwich home and which included two Beame aides. In other words, Beame likely had a vested interest in the police reaching a tidy conclusion, namely that the Son of Sam killings were the work of a lone nut. Many police officers chaffed at this assessment, but this was the view the Beame administration endorsed.

Let us call this the "Phase One" story concerning the Son of Sam killings, with apologies to Peter Dale Scott. As Beame's chief patron, Roy Cohn would have been well placed to influence the "Phase One" story.

However, Cohn also would have been in an excellent position to craft the "Phase Two" story, namely the one embraced by Terry and his followers: that the Son of Sam killings were the result of cult comprised of demented former hippies and acolytes of the Process, the OTO and other such organizations.

And how would Cohn have done this, you may ask. Well, consider Terry's employer at the time the Son of Sam killings begun:
"The New York Post, a recent acquisition of Australian publishing magnate Rupert Murdoch, was heavily involved in coverage of the Son of Sam case. At times, it was guilty of sensationalism, but so were the rest of the media. The Post was losing money when Murdoch took the reins, and he immediately laid claim to the .44-caliber investigation, engaging the Daily News, particularly, in a battle of headlines as the probe continued. It was said in New York that Murdoch 'hung his head on Son of Sam.' 
"Two weeks after Berkowitz arrest, I sat in the office of Peter Michelmore, the Post metropolitan editor, and elicited his interest in the subject of John Wheaties Carr and the Carr illustration studio. The Post was headquartered at 210 South Street, near the Seaport, not far from the Brooklyn Bridge. Its city room reflected the paper's financial struggles, with antiquated typewriters and general disarray in evidence.
"Murdoch had imported a number of Australian writers and editors to work at the Post; people he knew well from his overseas operations. Michelmore, a distinguished-looking, gray-haired man of about fifty, was one of those. 
" 'I think this John Carr thing is good stuff,' he said, after I explained what I'd discovered. Michelmore summoned columnist Steve Dunleavy, another Australian, and assigned him to work with me to develop the story... "
(The Ultimate Evil, Maury Terry, pg. 144) 
Steve Dunleavy
Dunleavy would go on to become one of the leader reporters in the TV tabloid show A Current Affair. He served as the basis for the serial killer-glorifying journalist Wayne Gale in Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers. Dunleavy was a longtime favorite of Murdoch and it should come as little surprise that he is the one who first put Terry into contact with Berkowitz via a prison informant. This was at time when Terry alleges many police officers didn't have access to Berkowitz. But Dunleavy did and he was more than happy to help Terry establish a dialogue.

As noted above, John Carr was an Air Force veteran alleged to have been involved in the Son of Sam cult. Thus, it would seem Terry was already closing in on his cult hypothesis at this point and Murdoch's paper was more than happy to give him the contacts needed to eventually write what became The Ultimate Evil.

As was noted in part three of this series, Cohn and Murdoch were very close, with Cohn introducing the Australian press magnet to various high ranking officials in the Reagan administration during the early 1980s. Cohn played a key role in Murdoch's rise in other words and here is Murdoch helping lay the foundation of the "Phase Two" story concerning the Son of Sam murders.

Ruppert Murdoch is to the center while Cohn is at the right
Clearly, Cohn would have been in position to influence Terry's investigation and as such, it should hardly come as surprise that the Process, the OTO and the Church of Scientology were all linked to the murders while organizations such as the National States' Rights Party and the broader Christian Identity/militia network were almost entirely ignored. This no doubt would have gotten too close to Cohn's sinister circle of associates.

Before moving along, there is one other interesting indirect connection to the Son of Sam case Cohn had. The Post's chief rival in covering the Son of Sam case was the New York Daily News. During the killing spree Berkowitz allegedly sent Daily News columnist Jimmy Breslin the infamous "Hello from the gutters..." letter that the newspaper later published in its entirety. The letter sparked hundreds of calls to the NYC police offering leads that were largely baseless. It is generally felt that the publication of this letter hurt the investigation and Breslin and the Daily News received a lot of criticism in the aftermath.

As was noted in part seven of this series, the Daily News was the newspaper that had linked Thomas Corbally to the Profumo scandal in 1963. After Roy Cohn threatened the paper with a six million dollar lawsuit, it promptly dropped the issue. What's more, there appears to have been no love lost between Breslin and Cohn. As such, this research can't help but wonder if the Son of Sam letter to Breslin and the controversy it stirred was another attack on the Daily News by Cohn.


Enter Corbally


As should come as little surprise to those of you who have been following this series, former OSS man, private detective-to-the-stars and blackmail specialist extraordinaire Thomas Corbally was also knee deep in this scene. But before getting to that, a bit needs to be said about another individual Terry linked to the Son of Sam cult. This would be showbiz promoter Roy Radin, who made a considerable fortune off of packing vaudeville shows and oldies music tours to various police unions across the northeast in the late 1970s and early 1980s. 

Radin owned a home in the Southhampton area of New York known as Ocean Castle. As noted above, the Hamptons were one location for the sex parties Cohn was linked too and Berkowitz (via Terry) alleged that Radin's mansion was another such location. Radin and the mansion had made headlines in 1980 when actress Melonie Haller alleged that she had been beaten and rapped there. Radin claimed that it was consensual and the story largely died down by the end of the year.

Ocean Castle
Radin would once again make headlines in 1983, this time for his murder. The promoter had become obsessed with breaking into Hollywood and had established a working relationship with legendary producer Robert Evans, who helped shepherd such movies to the screen as the Syndicate-glorifying The Godfather and Chinatown, a WWII area film noir concerning a private detective investigating a wealthy California man who is revealed to be involved in pedophilia and incest.

Oh, and Chinatown was also directed by convicted pedophile Roman Polanski, whose wife Sharon Tate was murdered by the Manson family. Elsewhere, Godfather director Francis Ford Coppola would go on to direct The Cotton Club, the film Evans would ultimately make with Radin's money. All of this begs the question of just how familiar Evans was with this network and how long the relationship had existed. 

Certainly Cohn and Corbally would have found more than a few elements of these films autobiographical and that likely wasn't by accident. As was noted in part five of this series, Evans was a key figure in the Hollywood-based prostitute ring Heidi Fleiss operated. In point of fact, Evans was something of a boyfriend to Fleiss and reportedly Fleiss had met Corbally via Evans. This was during the early 1990s and it would seem that Evans and Corbally had known one another for some time prior to this. Its quite possible their relationship stretched back to The Cotton Club project and even further back, if The Godfather and Chinatown are any indication.

Robert Evans
At the time The Cotton Club project began to heat up Evans was down on his luck and Radin appeared to have crucial financial support available. Another figure offering financial assistance was Karen Greenberger, who had cut her teeth selling cocaine in the Miami area a few years early. At the time she had married a key figure in the Medellin cartel which, as was noted in the second installment, had been supplying The Company with cocaine by the early 1980s. And in both cases, the contacts within the Medellin cartel were individuals linked to the Nazi-worshiping Carlos Lehder. More on Lehder's ties to the far right can be found here

This is not the only connection between The Company and Radin's murder either. Greenberger was close to fashion designer Leslie DeKeyser, frequently visiting him in Las Vegas, a city The Company was highly active in (noted in part three). In Sinister Forces Book III, Peter Levenda also notes that one of the Kentucky Derby figures allegedly involved with The Company was also close to DeKeyser. What's more Phyllis George, a former Miss America winner who was married to Robert Evans from 1977 to 1978, was the wife of John Y. Brown during the heyday of The Company. 

And then there was one of Radin's murderers, William Mentzer. Terry alleged that Mentzer was also involved with the Son of Sam cult, dubbing him "Manson II." He linked Mentzer to murder of Arlis Perry, a young woman for Minot, North Dakota who was brutally murdered at Stanford University in 1974 (as was noted in the prior installment, Stanford took over Clivden in 1968). At the time of Radin's murder, Mentzer was working for a security firm employed by pornographer Larry Flynt, another reputed Kentucky Derby regular. Previously Flynt had been using former OSS man and infamous arms trafficker Mitchell WerBell III for security. As was noted in part two of this series, WerBell likely had some type of working relationship with The Company prior to his death. Its also interesting to note Mentzer's security firm was also linked to WerBell's death, as was noted before here

As you can see, this whole network is rather incestuous and there even more direct links. For you see, Thomas Corbally was involved with the scene around Ocean Castle during the 1970s. The journalist who broke the Melonie Haller allegations in 1980, one Anthony Haden-Guest, has gone on record to note that Corbally was his source, among other things. Writing on The Daily Beast in 2014, Haden-Guest noted:
"In my piece I referred to the man who opened up a whole party world in the Hamptons for me only as ‘The Roman Senator,’ this being because he had kind of that look and because there was something of Roman decadence about the scene of which he was effectively the Godfather.
"Well, ‘the Roman Senator’ died ten years ago and his name was Tom Corbally. He was a terrific fellow, described in his obituary in the Guardian as a man who 'played significant roles in scandals and big-business battles on both sides of the Atlantic for forty years,' and in the London Times as 'a businessman and New York socialite cloaked in mystery and involved in international intrigue' who 'had friendships with Hollywood stars, business leaders and such international luminaries as Mother Teresa, Sir Jimmy Goldsmith of Britain and King Hussein of Jordan.' 
"The Hamptons world into which Corbally opened the door was small but intense, a clubby, pink and green trousered version of bondage, whippings and what have you, where—I quote myself—'sufferers from tennis elbow were likely to get a knowing look, or a coarse allusion to "thrasher’s arm" ' and where 'it seemed there was no shortage of lovelies longing to slip out of their Halstons into something uncomfortable.'
"I was shown photographs of shackled babes and a cute couple wincing as they were spattered with drippings from a lit candle.
"Corbally also showed me a collection of gizmos inventively put together from leather, glimmery metal, and rubber tubing...
"Why had Corbally been so ready to share? It turned out he was none too keen on some of the fresh faces horning in.
"The whole scene was supposed to be fun and games, he had said. But amateurs wouldn’t necessarily know where to draw those fine lines. 'You’ll do something wrong and you’ll end up in the headlines,' he had told them. He added that he had never accepted an invitation from Roy Radin." 
Thomas Corbally
Let this all sink in for a moment, especially the part about Corbally effectively being the "Godfather" of this whole scene. Also consider the similarities between these sex parties and the ones Corbally was involved in the UK over a decade earlier. Both were characterized by extreme sadomasochism, involved the wealthy and various VIPs and both were reputed to use minors at times. 

To this researcher's mind this lends a lot of credence to the allegations that Cohn was also involved in the scene. Corbally was Cohn's dog's boy and he was likely gathering blackmail material for his longtime attorney just as he had in the UK.  

This also provides a rather clear link between The Company and Radin's murder: Roy Cohn himself. Cohn was the attorney for Biff Halloran, who helped Bradley Bryant set up The Company and provided them with clients. And here's Corbally, Cohn's long time private detective, sniffing around the activities at Radin's house.  

It should be noted that another link is President Donald Trump himself, who also worked with both Halloran and Corbally. As was noted in part three, Trump was also very active in the Kentucky Derby scene by the early 1980s as well. 

Of course, none of this conclusively proves that Cohn was involved with the Son of Sam killings, but it does lend credence to the allegations concerning Cohn made by David Berkowitz to Terry, who in turn did absolutely nothing to follow up on these claims. But clearly Berkowitz was aware of this scene, which had only been hinted at occasionally to the general public, such as when Corbally leaked the Haller incident. This, along with Radin's eventual murder were probably a result of Radin's increasing instability. By all accounts, the drugs were bleeding him dry while also making him more and more on a loose canon. I suspect the Haller leak was a warning, and after he failed to pull his act together while The Cotton Club was going into production, he was eliminated.


Conclusions

For years Roy Cohn appears to have been a key intermediary between Overworld figures such as Hoover, Aristotle Onassiss and Trump on the one hand and on the other with underworld forces such as the Syndicate and The Company. But beyond this, Cohn was also a key key player in what appears to be a sex ring catering to extreme tastes (i.e. sadomasochism, pedophilia, etc) with both a national and an international scope.

I've compared the Profumo affair at times to Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut, but the New York-based ring of Roy Radin, Thomas Corbally and likely Cohn himself appears to be a more apt comparison. In point of fact, Kubrick may even have partly based the film on insider knowledge he had of this ring. Eyes was nominally based on a novella called Traumnovelle by the Austrian writer Arthur Schnitzler and Kubrick remained fairly faithful to its plot line.

One of the major points of departure, however, was the location: while Traumnovelle is set in Vienna, Kubrick relocated the film to New York City and the surrounding area. The infamous sex party depicted in the film takes place at an isolated country mansion outside of the city, and features several other elements present in the Stephen Ward and Radin circles, including masks and S & M. What's more, it is reputed that Ward's girls also worked out of New York City in the early 1960s, potentially servicing JFK, among others. This researcher suspects that Kubrick was well aware of this history and picked the New York setting with it in mind.


But beyond the sex rings, there's the even more ominous connection between Cohn and the alleged Son of Sam cult. While superficially this may seem incredible, it must be put into context.

Cohn was a part of a  broader international far right network I have dubbed the Fascist International. Up until the late 1980s, the key organizations representing this network were the American Security Council (in the US, noted at length before here), Le Cercle (Europe, noted at length here) and the World Anti-Communist League (WACL, the international coordinating body, noted at length here). As was noted in part three, Cohn was a member of Western Goals Foundation, a part of the US-based American Security Council network.

As was noted before here and here, both the WACL and Le Cercle were closely linked to Operations Condor and Gladio, effectively international terror campaigns carried out by the Fascist International with support from Western governments throughout the second half the twentieth century. And as was noted in those pieces, these networks frequently dealt in pedophile rings as well. And there was often an occult flavor --as was noted before here and here, the Propaganda Due Masonic lodge and followers of philosopher and occultist Julius Evola were used extensively in Gladio.

Julius Evola
If partners in Le Cercle and the WACL were engaged in such activities, is it such a stretch that their American counterparts would do the same?

And who would be better placed than Roy Cohn, who appears to have spent decades operating various honeytraps and who was well connected with a host of brutal killers?

And this dear reader cuts to the heart of why the Establishment is so terrified of Trump. Trump and many of his key backers such as Paul Manafort and Roger Stone are all proteges of Cohn. What's more, there are indication that they have carried on Cohn's work. Just consider Stone. As was noted before here, Stone appears to have been the one who brought down New York governor Eliot Spitzer after linking him to a prostitution ring and he was almost surely one of the individual who outed the NXIVM cult as well.

Ah, NXIVM --a cult that appears to have specialized in honeytrapping VIPs. Certainly it bares some similarities to how the alleged Son of Sam cult was used in New York state in terms of the sex parties. The killings, not so much.

But that may only be a matter of time. As Trump becomes more embattled, it is likely only a matter of time before these militia and Christian Identity networks from which the Son of Sam cult almost surely grew out of are activated. And if this happens, we are in for some interesting times indeed.

And with that I shall sign off for now. Until next time dear reader, stay tuned.

  

Men in Black: Discussing the Knights of Malta on Conspirinormal

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Since you kids can't seem to get enough of the Maltese knights, I was enlisted for another discussion on them, this time with the good folks at Conspirinormal. For those of you unaware, the Sovereign Military Order of Malta (SMOM) has a nearly thousand year history stretching back to the Crusades. SMOM claims to be the legitimate descendants of the Knights Hospitaller, later known as the Knights of Cyprus and Rhodes and a host of other names.

Over the centuries, the Maltese knights have found themselves at the center of a host of intrigues, including the capture of Jerusalem and the suppression of the Knights Templar. In more recent years they've turned up frequently in deep events and the occult underground of the twenty and twenty-first centuries.

But in these United States, they've also faced a challenge since the 1950s from various Sovereign Orders of Saint John (SOSJ) that claim to be the legitimate successor to the Knights Hospitaller from the Russian line of descent. In this podcast we address the infamous Charles Pichel version of the SOSJ (sometimes referred to as the Shickshinny Knights of Malta) and a more recent manifestation of the group that features the infamous General William "Jerry" Boykin as a Grand Chancellor. Needless to say, these groups appear to have been at the heart of much domestic terrorism in the US for several decades now.

General William Boykin (left) in his SOSJ getup
The podcast can be found on YoutTube here.

Additional background on the topics discussed can be found here:
Men in Black: The Hidden History of the Knights of Malta Part I
Propaganda Due: A Strange and Terrible Journey Into the Heart of the Deep State Part XI
Le Cercle: Puppetmasters
A Vast Right Wing Conspiracy: The Secret Origins of the Patriot Movement Part IV
Trump, the JSOC, and the Legacy of ARTICHOKE

I hope everyone finds this discussion and the links provided informative. Before wrapping up, a brief note on programming: I know new posts have been a bit scarce of late, but be assured I'm hard at work. Presently, several of the topics I'm looking into are extremely research heavy. As such, it might be a few weeks until one of them is ready to start working on. When I've had this problem in the past, I've usually focused on current events. But as it stands, making sense of current events nowadays is a bit daunting, to say the least. Still, I'll keep my eyes peeled for recent developments that I feel I can add insight too.

In other words, please be patient. There are some exciting projects in the works around here and the wait will be worth it. And with that I shall sign off for now. Say tuned dear readers.


Secret Armies and the Origins of the Cercle Complex Part I

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Regular readers of this blog are no doubt aware of my interest in a curious organization known variously as Le Cercle, the Pinay Group, Pinay Circle/Cercle and a host of other titles. The organization was founded in 1952 by longtime German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, onetime German Defense Minister Franz Josef-Strauss, French Prime Minister Antoine Pinay (for whom the organization was sometimes named after) and the mysterious Frenchman known as Jean Violet. It grew out of the United Europe movement and would become one of the two principal networks working towards this goal, along with the infamous Bilderberg group.

But while there was overlap between Bilderberg and Le Cercle in the early years, there were fundamental differences between these groups that led to a rift by the 1970s. Bilderberg was chiefly comprised of international bankers and other captains of industry and has long been dominated by the Anglo-American Establishment. Le Cercle, by contrast, was largely dominated by elites from Continental Europe until the 1980s, many of whom were drawn from the ranks of the Vatican and the old aristocracy. Catholicism was as much a part of Le Cercle's vision of a United Europe in the early days as was capitalism.

What's more, unlike Bilderberg, Le Cercle was not simply a policy coordination body, but also a full blown private intelligence network. As I've noted before here, here and here, Le Cercle appears to have played a crucial role in what is commonly referred to as Operation Gladio as well as various sex rings across Europe used to blackmail regional elites. As such, it has long enjoyed close ties with various Western intelligence services, especially those in the US and UK.


Recent research I've been conducting has indicated that this relationship may have stretched back to the origins of Gladio and that Le Cercle itself may have grown out of this network as a coordination body. This is the general thesis of this series.

Before moving along, a few words about Gladio: For one, Gladio is only the name of the Italian component of a network that stretched across Western Europe during the Cold War. Gladio and related components were meant to serve as stay-behind-armies in Western Europe in the event of a Soviet invasion, effectively waging an intense guerrilla war against the Reds. Or at least that was the official reasoning anyway. In actuality, these stay-behind or secret armies were more often than not used to terrorize Western nations to ensure their submission to NATO and the United States on the whole. The terrorism related to Italy's "Years of Lead" and Belgium's "Bloody Eighties" can largely be traced back to the stay-behind networks in these nations, as I noted before here and here.

And it would appear that Le Cercle loomed over all these networks, and may have from the very beginning. But before getting to the origins of Le Cercle let us first consider the history of these secret armies. Essentially, two World War II-era organizations appear to have served as the basis for these secret armies and were incorporated wholesale into Gladio at the onset of the Cold War. As such, a few words should be said about the WWII-era functions of these organizations.


Special Operations Executive 

The first of these organizations up for consideration is the Special Operations Executive (SOE), a British intelligence network created at the onset of World War II. SOE had its origins in Section D of MI6 and several other operations being carried out by the Foreign and War Offices. When Churchill came to power in 1940, all of these operations were coordinated under the SOE, which came to be housed in the Ministry of Economic Warfare.

SOE is probably most well known in these United States for the role it played in creating the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the predecessor to the CIA. The SOE worked closely with the British Security Coordination (BSC) in New York City prior to US entry into the Second World War. Along with the BSC and MI6, it maintained a branch office in Rockefeller Center beginning in 1940. Sir William Stephenson, head of the BSC and a close friend of OSS Director William "Wild Bill" Donovan, coordinated the operations of the SOE and MI6 in the States. He helped Donovan set up the OSS, which was largely modeled upon the SOE.

the famed Rockefeller Center
The SOE in turn maintained a massive training compound in Canada that was used initially to train OSS agents being deployed to Europe.
"... Camp X. Located on the north shore of Lake Ontario, between the Canadian towns of Oshawa and Whitby, the camp was the first paramilitary training school in North America. Established in December 1941, just one day before the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, the 270-acre site was operated by Britain's ultra-secret Special Operations Executive. SOE had been formed as a branch of MI-6 in July 1940, after Winston Churchill instructed his military advisers to counter Nazi blitzkrieg victories and 'set Europe ablaze.' SOE's first order of business was to recruit and train hundreds of secret agents, who would be responsible for advancing sabotage, subversion, and organized resistance against Axis occupied areas. Camp X, also called Project J and STS-103, offered its carefully selected students a full curriculum in the techniques of guerrilla warfare, covert action, and assassination...
"Training at Camp X was extremely rigorous. Recruits were routinely roused well before dawn to perform several hours of strenuous physical exercise before they were allowed a Spartan morning meal consisting of little more than a glass of milk and a hard roll. Then it was on to a full day of classes with instructions in subjects like 'Close Combat,' 'Small and Concealed Weapons,' and 'Silent Killing.' The camp featured a number of extremely difficult 'infiltration courses,' one of which featured a large swamp dubbed 'Lake Oshawa' by SOE instructors; for more substantial water exercises, the frigid waters of Lake Ontario were only twenty minutes away. Camp X's training ethos were simple; it revolved around the mantra, 'Kill or be killed.' Several times a week, trainees would participate in group jiu jitsu training, led by their chief instructor, British Major William Ewart Fairbairn, during which words were chanted, in cadence with martial movements, for hours on end. Said one former student years later, 'It turned our values upside down and we wondered about making a world fit for terrorists.' "
(A Terrible Mistake, H.P. Albarelli, pgs. 393-394) 
Camp X
These fears would prove to be most well founded, as we shall see.

During the Second World War, the SOE built up a massive and highly effective network that the great Daniele Ganser referred to as "a carbon of operation Gladio born in the midst of the Second World War" (NATO's Secret Armies, pg. 41). Ganser went on to note:
"Special Operations Executive employed many of the staff of Section D and eventually became a major organisation in its own right with over 13,000 men and women in its ranks, operating on a global scale and in close cooperation with the MI6. Although SOE also carried out missions in Far East Asia, mounted from India and Australia, Western Europe was its main theatre of operation where it focused on establishing of national secret armies. SOE promoted sabotage and subversion in enemy-occupied territory and established nucleus of trained men who could assist resistance groups in the re-conquest of the countries concerned. 'SOE was for five years the main instrument of British action in the internal politics of Europe,' the British Cabinet Office report noted, 'it was an extremely powerful instrument' for it could serve a multitude of tasks and thus 'While SOE was at work no European politician could be under the illusion that the British were uninterested or dead.' "
 (NATO's Secret Armies, Daniele Ganser, pg. 41)
the emblem of the SOE
Curiously, SOE veterans would serve as the backbone of Cercle members from the UK when the British began to take a keen interest in the organization during the 1970s. Lord Julian Amery, a future Cercle chairman and president, noted before here, cut his teeth with the SOE in Albania during WWII. By the 1980s he had been joined Le Cercle by his former SOE comrade-in-arms Neil "Billy" McLean.

Another future Cercle chairman, Sir Peter Tennant, was also an SOE veteran, having been recruited by Sir Charles Hambro, the eventual director of the SOE. Another Hambro associate who would sign up with Le Cercle was Harry Sporburg, a deputy chief of SOE under Hambro's predecessor, Colin Gubbins. Later, he would go on to work for the banking house long controlled by the Hambro family.

Sporborg's association with Le Cercle is especially ominous. Sporborg has been described as the individual who first conceived of Gladio, though I have been unable to confirm this. I have been able to confirm, however, that he helped establish an especially controversial British charity typically known as Sue Ryder. The Sue Ryder who served as the namesake of this charity was herself a veteran of the SOE during the Second World War. It would later be revealed that Jimmy Savile abused at least one dying child at a Sue Ryder children's hospice in Leeds. Its possible there were more victims at this institute, but no one is alive now to tell tales. But moving along.

Another British Cercle chairman and future president, Brian Crozier, never worked with the SOE, but received ample aid from such veterans over the years. His Institute for the Study of Conflict (ISC), a major Cercle propaganda outfit by the early 1970s, received its initial funding from SOE veteran Sir Peter Wilkinson. Another SOE veteran, Stephen Hastings, was deeply involved in Shield, a private intelligence network Crozier established in the UK in the 1970s to help elect Thatcher. Sporborg and Tennant were also involved with Shield, which was a domestic version of the global intelligence network Crozier established with the assistance of Le Cercle known as the 6I. Hastings was also a member of the Monday Club and a longtime political alley of Amery. He is known to have attended Cercle meetings during the late 1970s but it is unknown if he was a full blown member.


Clearly, SOE veterans were a key source of support for the Cercle complex by the 1970s and eventually they would dominate the organization by the 1980s. This curious relationship has been little remarked upon, but given the role the SOE had in establishing Gladio, it is hardly surprising. For all of this information I'm deeply indebted to David Teacher's groundbreaking and long suppressed Rogue Agents, which can be found here on the great Institute for the Study of Globalization and Covert Politics (ISGP). ISGP's own Cercle page is also a great resource.


Reich Main Security Office

But while the SOE connection to Gladio has received some attention over the years, the influence of another WWII-era intelligence agency has been even less remarked upon. This is not entirely surprising as the Reich Main Security Office (RSHA) was the chief intelligence and security service for the SS. Of course the role Reinhard Gehlen, who at one point was the German General Staff's chief intelligence officer for the Fremde Heere Ost(FHO, Foreign Armies East) and the founder of the BND, played in German and Eastern European stay-behind networks is fairly well known at this point. But Gehlen was an agent of the Wehrmacht, the German military. Gehlen was not an SS man and while known for rather brutal interrogation methods, was not a fanatical Nazi. In point of fact, Gehlen comes off as rather restrained in comparison to the legions of the psychopaths in the RSHA, many of whom would serve as the backbone of Gehlen's secret armies.

Gehlen
But before getting to that, a bit more should be said about the RSHA. Created in 1939, it quickly grew into one of the most Byzantine institutions in Nazi Germany (no small accomplishment, that). The man often credited with its creation was General Reinhard Heydrich, one of the chief architects of the Holocaust. Heydrich headed the organization from its creation in 1939 until 1942, when he was assassinated --by the SOE.

During his time overseeing the RSHA, Heydrich incorporated many of the most brutal components of the Nazi Party into the organization. The RSHA was divided into seven Amters or sections. Amt IV and Amt V included the dreaded Gestapo and the Kriminalpolizei (which was somewhat akin to Nazi Germany's FBI). Amt IV also oversaw many aspects of the Holocaust.

Amt III was comprised of the domestic wing of the SD, the SS's own private intelligence service and the chief rival of the Abwehr during the Second World War. For our purposes here, however, we are most concerned with Amt VI and Amt VII. Amt VI featured the foreign component of the SD, which became one of the most powerful intelligence services of WWII era by war's end.
"... Amt VI ('Department Six') of the SS RSHA, Nazi Germany's main security headquarters. This SS section had been a combined foreign intelligence, sabotage, and propaganda agency and was, in effect, the CIA of Nazi Germany. By war's end SS RSHA Amt VI had consolidated not only the foreign sections of the Nazi's police intelligence apparatus but military intelligence (Abwehr), Gehlen's own FHO, and much of the Nazi Party's internal foreign espionage network as well. Amt VI was an extraordinary rich collection of trained agents, intelligence files, saboteurs, and propagandist. Both Gehlen and the United States drew many of their most valuable recruits from this department after the war. Its hoard of files on the USSR and Eastern Europe, in particular, was without equal anywhere."
(Blowback, Christopher Simpson, pg. 46)

Of especial interest was Amt VI-S. Created in 1943, Amt VI-S would emerge as the special operations forces of Nazi Germany. At the time this unit was conceived of as a counter to the British SOE  and Special Air Services (SAS) and the American OSS. Tapped to head the unit was the infamous Otto "Scarface" Skorzeny, allegedly Hitler's favorite commando. Virtually everyone who met Skorzeny agreed that he was very inch of soldier. Standing at 6'4 and weighing around 220 pounds of mostly muscle, the Austrian was as fine an example of Hitler's notion of Aryan superiority as any.

The Hunting Group

Skorzeny, prior to the war, had trained as an engineer and generally comes off as more intelligent than he is often given credit for. Certainly the intense training he subjected his charges too would test both their physical and mental limits.
"... Skorzeny's unit would eventually be known as SS-Jagdverband or 'Hunting Group.' Skorzeny recruited personnel throughout the Reich'ss various military units. He wanted to acquire only those of the highest caliber and as such received special permission to recruit from all the services, not just the Waffen SS. Eventually, his commando group included army, navy, and air force personnel, which resulted in Skorzeny becoming the preeminent special forces commander of the Third Reich.
"Besides having a foreign language requirement, the recruits had to demonstrate basic skills and knowledge of firearms, grenades, artillery, and the ability to operate automobiles, motorcycles, watercraft, and locomotives. They also had to be expert swimmers and able to parachute from aircraft. Many were capable of speaking foreign languages such as English, French, Italian, Russian, and Persian. An intense commando training regimen was instituted. Some individuals were selected for special agent training. All of Skorzeny's training was tough and included covert operation skills required for stay-behind missions in enemy territory."
(The Skorzeny Papers, Ralph P. Ganis, pg. 38)
As the war began to turn against Nazi Germany in the wake of the disastrous Battle of Stalingrad, Skorzeny became increasingly involved in training stay-behind units. Some of the earliest and most infamous were Eastern units, largely comprised of Ukrainians, that were used to harass the Red Army as the Germans retreated from the Ukraine. These units were drawn from the ranks of the infamous Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), which in turn grew out of the equally infamous Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists-Bandera (OUN-B). There had been an early OUN, but with approval of the Nazis, the more radical OUN-B emerged out of this group. While its relationship with the Nazi regime would be ambiguous at best throughout the war, the OUN-B was still the chief Ukrainian Quisling group and a vigorous participant in the Holocaust.

the emblem of the OUN-B
When the war turned against the Nazis in the East, the UPA was founded by the OUN-B to assist the German withdraw. Skorzeny trained many of these units, which would prove to be highly effective.
"... accelerated German recruitment of Ukrainians from police groups into the Waffen SS, and by increased cooperation with the underground OUN/UPA leadership and a secret program that the SS-designated Operation Sonnenblume (Sunflower). According to U.S. interrogations of SS RSHA Amt VI clandestine operations chief Otto Skorzeny and his adjutant Karl Radl, Amt VI organized Sonnenblume in 1944 to coordinate German and OUN efforts during the Nazis' retreat from Russia.
"Thousands of tons of arms, ammunition, and other war materiel abandoned by the Nazis were consigned to underground OUN-led troops, Skorzeny told the Americans. The deal proved to be an astute investment for the Germans. The OUN/UPA succeeded in tying down some 200,000 Red Army troops and killing more than 7,000 Soviet officers during the Wehrmacht's disordered flight across Europe during 1944 and 1945."
(Blowback, Christopher Simpson, pgs. 162-163)
Curiously, many of the OUN-B members would go on to play a crucial rule in establishing the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations (ABN). The ABN in turn would play a key role in creating the World Anti-Communist League (WACL, noted before here), one of the key components of the post-war Fascist International. Both the ABN and especially the WACL would establish a close working relationship with Le Cercle. But back to the matter at hand.


Skorzeny also had some involvement in the legendary Werwolf project, though not to the extent that is generally claimed. SS General Hans-Adolf Prutzmann was the actual head of the project, with Skorzeny's "Hunting Group" provided some training and support to the Werwolf units.

For those of you unaware, the Werwolf project was begun in 1944 as the war was winding down. Originally the Werwolf participants were conceived as additional commando units that could be used to conduct sabotage and assassinations behind enemy lines. Towards the end of the war, Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels made brazen claims that the Werwolf units would be used as a stay-behind force to wage a guerrilla war against the Occupation, a claim that Allies initially took very seriously.

However, it is now widely agreed that these claims were pure propaganda. There does not appear to have been a serious plan to wage a guerrilla war against the Allies and in fact the Werwolf units were largely poorly trained and equipped. Their chief value to the Nazi regime was principally for psychological warfare purposes.

Skorzeny was involved in other, much more highly effective stay-behind operations, however. One of the most notorious was the so-called "Peter Group" of Denmark, which was created to counter the SOE-backed resistance in that particular Nordic country. The group as commanded by Otto Schwerdt, one Skorzeny's top men in the SD.

Another, even more curious group Skorzeny was involved in was known as the "Organisation Technique" (OT). This group was also established in 1944, shortly after France was liberated by the Allies. The OT was intended as a stay-behind network that would conduct sabotage and assassination operations against the Allies in France.
"... the OT was created by Joseph Darnand, the former head of the Vichy Milice (French fascist paramilitary), consisting of 150-200 volunteers to be trained as agents and sent back in France to fight the Allied forces. 
"Command of the OT was given to Jean Degans, a former member of the Cagoule and former director of the Vichy police. OT liaison with the Germans came from Skorzenys Jagdverband, and Jean Fillliol, a former Cagoule who exercised 'day-to-day' control of the group. Several OT sabotage and secret service camps were established in Germany with training and operational planning coming directly from Skorzeny's special forces."
(The Skorzeny Papers, Ralph P. Ganis, pg. 60) 

OT creator Joseph Darnand, like seemingly every other major member of the group, had also been a member of the dreaded Cagoule in the years leading up to the war. La Cagoule, which was addressed before here and here, was a secret society and paramilitary organization active in France during 1936 and 1937. During those years the group stockpiled an enormous amount of arms and engaged in several assassinations and bombings, with an eye towards plunging France into a civil war. From there the Cagoule, along with their extensive supporters in the military, would establish a fascist dictatorship in France along the lines of those in Italy and Spain.

Needless to say, things didn't quite work out that way. The organization was largely neutralized by French police in 1937, with most key members in prison by the end of that year. But with the outbreak of the war in 1939, many Cagoulards were released to defend the homeland. After the French defeat most Cagoulards signed up with the Vichy regime, were they gained some degree of influence. Others went to De Gaulle's Resistance movement. Towards the end of the war, they became a crucial back channel between the US and the Nazi regime.

The above-mentioned Jean Violet, a founder of Le Cercle, had been a member of the Cagoule prior to the war. Violet is generally regarded as the chief force behind the creation of Le Cercle and the dominant personality behind the group until his departure in the late 1970s.


Amt VII

And finally we come to Amt VII, easily the most mysterious section of the RHSA. When most (scholarly) researchers consider occultism in the SS, they look to the Ahnenerbe, that curious "think tank" that dabbled in so much esoteric research both prior to and during the Second World War. And while the Ahnenerbe was without a doubt the chief agency within the SS for researching occultic topics, Amt VII would quietly delve into the same waters with equal vigor. Officially Amt VII was the "Written Records" section of the RSHA, essentially its library. But this was a library that specialized in especially arcane research.
"... AMT VII of the RSHA, the 'Ideological Research' Division that handled occultism, Freemasonry, and cults. From 1941-1945, this division have been under the leadership of Dr. Franz Alfred Six, a scholarly SS-Brigadefuhrer who earlier became prominent as a leader of the Vorkmmando Moskau: a death squad that roamed occupied Russia, murdering hundreds of civilians, dissidents, and Jews in 1941. Six joined the SD in April of 1935 when he was only twenty-six years old; in 1939 he became head of AMT II of the RSHA. A year later, Heydrich named him his future representative in Great Britain after the hypothetically successful Nazi invasion of the British Isles. In other words, Dr. Six would have been largely responsible for program of 'ethnic cleansing' in England had the Nazis managed to invade and occupy the country. 
".... It is said that Himmler created the bizarre occult research division of the RSHA –AMT VII – specifically for Six, so pleased as he was by Six's enthusiasm for hunting down the enemies of the Reich in Russia during the summer of 1941 at Smolensk."
(Unholy Alliance, Peter Levenda, pg. 237)
Six had actually left Amt VII in 1943 and was replaced by Paul Dittel, another SD man. Throughout its brief existence, appears to have maintained a close relationship with the SD, especially Amt VI. Six had been a member of Amt VI, as had Werner Goettsch, another Amt VII man that shall be addressed in a moment. This has led to some confusion among researchers, with some claiming that Amt VII was a part of the SD. Technically they were separate departments, with the SD consisting of Amt III and Amt VI in the RSHA. Still, there was clearly close collaboration and various members of VI would later work with Amt VII.

Back to one of those members, the above-mentioned Werner Goettsch. Goettsch was a close friend of fellow SD agent Otto von Bolschwing, who enjoyed a longstanding working relationship with the CIA in the post-war years. Goettsch was also close to Ernst Kaltenbrunner, who became head of the RHSA in the wake of Heydrich's assassination. Kaltenbrunner was an old fencing partner of Otto Skorzeny from their academy days. It was Kaltenbrunner who recommended Skorzeny to lead the SS's commando units.

Kaltenbrunner
During his time with Amt VI, Goettsch played a key role in establishing SD intelligence networks in the Balkans. Then, in 1943, he was transfer to Amt VII for curious reasons. A report by the Counterintelligence Corps (CIC) noted:
"while deep in this reading which changed his feelings towards Nazi ideology, GOETTSCH was appointed liaison officer between Amt VI and the Propaganda Ministry. Because of continued illness and a changed ideological point of view, GOETTSCH asked KALTENBRUNNER to transfer him to Amt VII. Later he sought the acquaintance of Dr DOPPLER, a Freemason in VIENNA, who later advised him concerning the evacuation of Amt VII'S library."
(Dreamer of the Day, Kevin Coogan, pg. 322) 
The reading that changed Goettsch's point of view involved works on political theory, history and mysticism. Nor was Goettsch the only SD man who would use Amt VII to research the occult at the end of the war.

The infamous Italian philosopher and occultist Julius Evola had enjoyed a longstanding association with the SD that likely went back to at least 1939 despite Evola's ideology being denounced by Volkish elements in the SS. Evola was close to members of the Romanian Iron Guard, which Werner Goettsch's friend Otto von Bolschwing had also worked with while detailed to the SD. Evola's early work with the SD may have derived from his connection to the Guard as well. Former members of the Iron Guard would later help establish the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations, as was noted before here.

Evola was officially involved with the RSHA by the end of the war, but what exactly he was doing is shrouded in mystery.
"...  Historian Richard Drake says that while he was in Vienna, 'Evola performed vital liaison services for the SS as Nazi Germany sought to recruit a European army for the defense of the Continent against the Soviet Union and the United States.' According to his own account, Evola spent his time living incognito while doing 'intellectual' research. But what kind of research? 
"While Evola was in Vienna, the SD supplied him with a series of arcane texts plundered from private libraries and rare book collections. The SD bureau the provided him with these documents was Amt VII, an obscure branch that served as an RSHA research library. With this precious archive, Evola closely studied masonic rituals and translated certain 'esoteric texts' for a book called Historie Secrete des Societes Secretes.  It never appeared because Evola claimed that all his documents were lost during the Russian bombardment."
(Dreamer of the Day, Kevin Coogan, pgs. 319-320)
Julius Evola
But is it possible Evola was doing both --working on a book on occultism while helping set up a stay-behind army? And were these to projects totally unrelated? The great Kevin Coogan proposes that Evola was involved in setting up a kind of secret society that could sustain the SS in the wake of the Third Reich's defeat.

As outlandish as it may sound, there can be little doubt that Evola played some as yet unknown role in the Gladio-inspired Years of Lead in Italy, as was noted before here. And there can be even less doubt that Evola had an enormous influence on Italian neo-fascist terrorists in thep ost-war years.
"The use of violence in Italian neo-fascism escalated with numerous bomb attacks and massacres, beginning with the Piazza Fontana explosion in Milan in April 1969. Adriano Romauldi, a leading young neo-fascist, identified Evola in 1971 as the intellectual hero of militant right-wing youth in Italy 'because the teaching of Evola is also a philosophy of total war.' By 1975, the far-right underground adopted a leftist strategy in mounting attacks against the state itself (murders of officials, robberies in ministries). The trend towards violence continued, so that by the late 1970s a cult of action replaced ideology itself, elevating the idea of combat to an existential duty. Neo-fascist terrorist such as Franco Freda and Mario Tuti frequently reprinted and cited Evola's two most militant tracts, Metafisica della guerra (1935) and Dottrina ariana (1940), in praise of 'heroic,' 'exemplary' action without an instrumental purpose.... Groups such as Movimento Revoluzionario Popolare, Terza, and Nuclei Armati Rivoluzionari subsequently unleashed a surge of black terrorism in Italy until the majority of militants had been captured or killed and a handful fled abroad."
(Black Sun, Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, pgs. 67-68)
Could this also help explain why so many Amt VI men like Six and Goettsch would end with Amt VII as the war was going into a critical stage studying the occult. Wouldn't their services have been put to better use in other fields? Or was there was some truth to Coogan's notion of a Black Order?

During his time with the RSHA at war's end, Evola was detailed to Vienna. Otto Skorzeny, a man also deeply involved in SS stay-behind networks, was also active in Vienna at times during this period as well. Did their work overlap and were their postwar efforts part of the Black Order Evola conceived of in the final days of the Third Reich?

As well shall see, there were certainly a few post war connections to either man. And with that I shall sign off for now. Until next time dear reader, stay tuned.


Discussing "Goodfellas" on Opperman

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I'm back on the Opperman Report, this time discussing the various highlights from my "Goodfellas" series.

Topics broached included the curious history of Resorts International, a gaming interest with extensive ties to the US intelligence community and organized crime that Donald J. Trump became CEO of in 1986; Trump's sinister political mentor, attorney Roy Cohn; Cohn's links to the Profumo Affair and how this scandal disgraced globalist elements of the Tories while sparing those eventually linked to the Pinay Circle/Le Cercle; the presence of so many descendants of key figures of the Round Table movement figures, especially those linked to the Cliveden Set, in Le Cercle; Roy Cohn's links to the long reputed Son of Sam cult; the overlap between said cult and various Christian Identity terrorists; the possibility Manson was a follower of identity "theology"; the far right connections of the Process Church of the Final Judgment; the credibility of Maury Terry; the many sex scandals Cohn's longtime private detective Thomas Corbally appears in; the Mueller probe as an instrument to silence Cohn's former associates; Roger Stone and NXIVM; and of course the Company and Kentucky Derby days. In other words, its quite an epic chat that Ed and I have.

The interview can be found here.

The articles that this interview is based upon include:

Goodfellas: The Hidden History of Resorts International
Goodfellas: The Dark Tower and Beyond Part I
Goodfellas: The Dark Tower and Beyond Part II
Goodfellas Part III: Viva Las Vegas
Goodfellas Part IV: Lavender Mafia Edition
Goodfellas Part V: The Bedroom Dick
Goodfellas Part VI: Cliveden Games
Goodfellas Part VII: Jack and Bobby
Goodfellas Part VIII: Sons of Cohn

A big thank you to Ed for having me back on. I hope everyone enjoys the chat. As always dear readers, stay tuned.


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