[part 5]

Consider the case of Craig Spence, a behind-the-scenes Republican powerbroker in Washington. In June of 1989, the Washington Times published a story that sent shock waves across Capitol Hill. It seems that Spence had been operating a call-boy ring that supplied young boys, some of them very young boys, to the Washington elite of both political parties.

It was rumored that a list of influential clients ran to some 200 names, and some of them were publicly identified. On the list were such names as former CIA director William Casey, former prosecutor and current cable 'news' talking- head Joseph diGenova, nominally liberal Congressman Barney Frank, political activist/propagandist Phyllis Schlafly, and former Attorney General John Mitchell - who once co-hosted a party with Spence.

Also connected to the case were prominent figures in the media; on the guest lists for Spence's 'parties' were names such as Ted Koppel and Eric Severeid - who had both been close friends of Spence's for more than two decades. Koppel had first met Spence when he was serving as the ABC bureau chief in Hong Kong and Spence was purportedly working as a correspondent in Vietnam.

Spence's mansion was found to be overflowing with surveillance equipment, including hidden cameras and microphones and an abundance of two-way mirrors. It was alleged that the ring was part of a CIA sexual blackmail operation, gathering compromising evidence on Washington politicos and foreign dignitaries. In August, following his arrest on weapon and drug charges, Spence gave an interview to the Times in which he openly claimed to work for the CIA and with high-ranking members of the Reagan and Bush administrations.

His claims were scoffed at and he was largely portrayed as a self-important blowhard. There are indications though that Spence was involved in covert operations as far back as Vietnam, working under journalistic cover. An associate of his from that time told the Washington Post: "Spence pulled

disappearing acts in Vietnam -- sometimes for weeks at a time ... Then he'd turn up, refusing to say where he'd been."

In Washington, Spence was known to take his show on the road, giving some of his boys regular late-night tours of the White House. These tours were reportedly arranged by Donald Gregg, the national security adviser to then-Vice President George Bush. Though Gregg adamantly denied the accusation, there were undeniable connections between the two men, including the fact that Spence had once sponsored a dinner for Gregg.

The story quickly dropped off the media radar screen, and Washington and the press proceeded to pretend as though it had never been aired at all. According to a Washington Times reporter, the paper trail was quickly covered-up - some 20,000 documents pertaining to the case were sealed by court order. By the time Spence turned up dead in a Boston hotel room less than five months after the story first broke, he was all but forgotten.

The UK's Independent reported that: "Boston police said he was found lying on his bed at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel, dressed in evening clothes, with no obvious signs of injury. The police refused to comment on the cause of death." The Post had earlier reported that Spence had told a friend: "I may be disappearing soon. It will be sudden. It may appear to be a suicide, but it won't be."

Elsewhere in the country, a political operative named Larry King - hailed as "the fastest rising black star in the Republican Party" - was embroiled in another high-level pedophile ring. King, whose operation was based in Omaha, Nebraska, had connections to Craig Spence as well as to Ronald Reagan, George Bush, Oliver North, and various other major players in Washington.

The story first began to emerge with the collapse of the Franklin Community Credit Union run by King, one of many such entities that went belly-up in the 1980s savings and loan scandals. A special senate 'Franklin Committee' was formed to look into allegations of financial improprieties, but soon found itself instead investigating claims of child prostitution, child pornography and ritual homicide. Committee members soon found themselves receiving anonymous threats.

The investigation led to the doorsteps of some of the most powerful men in the state of Nebraska - including newspaper publisher Harold Andersen (a lunch partner of George Bush), local columnist Peter Citron, a judge, the mayor of Omaha, the city's Games and Parks Commissioner, a prominent attorney, the former police chief of Omaha, businessman Alan Baer, and multi-billionaire Warren Buffet (for whose son King sponsored a political fund-raiser).

Also identified as a perpetrator by some of the victim/witnesses was George Bush himself. The scandal was completely ignored by the national U.S. media, and appears to have been covered by the local press for the sole purpose of

discrediting the witnesses and denouncing the investigation as yet another 'witch hunt.'

The case did attract some attention from the European press though. Pronto, the largest circulation weekly in Spain, reported that the scandal "appears to directly implicate politicos of the state of Nebraska and Washington, D.C. who are very close to the White House and George Bush." The report also noted that "there is reason to believe that the CIA is directly implicated," and that the "FBI refuses to help in the investigation and has sabotaged any efforts" by others to do so.

A documentary film crew from the UK's Yorkshire Television, working in conjunction with the Discovery Channel, worked for months investigating the case. The result of their efforts was a film entitled "Conspiracy of Silence" which concluded that the child victims/witnesses were telling the truth. The documentary was scheduled to air on the Discovery Channel on May 3, 1994.

Just days before its scheduled airing, the film was pulled without explanation and all copies were ordered destroyed. At least one production copy of the video survived the purge, however, and has been known to circulate among those derisively labeled as 'conspiracy theorists.' For everyone else, the conspiracy of silence continues.

The Omaha operation, described in the film as a "large ring of rich and powerful pedophiles," appears to have been in business for several years - with the knowledge of, and for the perverse pleasure of, a variety of city, state and federal authorities. Jerry Lowe, the first investigator assigned to the case by the Franklin Committee, reported back that: "The allegations regarding the exploitation of children are indeed disturbing. What appears to be documented cases of child abuse and sexual abuse dating back several years with no enforcement action being taken by the appropriate agencies is on its face, mind- boggling."

The investigation revealed that many of the child victims had been recruited from one of America's most revered charitable organizations - Boy's Town, to whom King had maintained close ties since 1979. Senator Loran Schmit has said: "Boy's Town came up frequently during the investigation, but we found it difficult to get information about Boy's Town," as did the film crew from Yorkshire Television.

Republican state senator and Franklin Committee member John DeCamp, in his book The Franklin Cover-Up, presents a compelling body of evidence to document the charges made by the child victims and various others associated with the operation. Equally disturbing is the evidence of the massive cover-up that was perpetrated by the FBI, local police, the grand jury assigned to the case, and of course the ever-compliant media.

The cover-up involved, according to DeCamp, the untimely deaths of at least fifteen key players in the scandal - including Franklin Committee investigator Gary Caradori, whose private plane was blown out of the sky on July 11, 1990 with Caradori and his eight-year-old son on board. Caradori had been threatened frequently, as had the witnesses from whom he was gathering information. His vehicle had also been repeatedly tampered with.

His brother claimed that Gary had told him that he had recently come into the possession of a key piece of evidence - specifically a book of addresses and phone numbers - which "if they knew he had it, they'd kill him." The wreckage of his plane was, as a reporter on the scene noted, "strewn over a 3/4 to 1 mile stretch." A National Transportation Safety Board investigator acknowledged that: "the fact that the wreckage is scattered over a large area certainly demonstrates that it did break up in flight."

Family members claimed that there were items missing from the plane's wreckage, most significantly Caradori's briefcase. Within twenty-four hours of the crash, all of his records had been impounded by the FBI. Nevertheless, the NTSB ruled that the crash had been accidental, with no evidence of sabotage.

The Franklin Committee - led by Senator Schmit, who suspected sabotage - ordered a private investigation into the cause of the crash. Strangely enough, the man selected to conduct that inquiry was William Colby, a fifty year veteran of intelligence operations whose career began in the OSS during World War II. Colby's hiring was urged by his protégé, Senator DeCamp.

In the 1950s, Colby had served as the CIA station chief in Italy during the notorious Operation Gladio days. In the 1960s, he ran the equally notorious Phoenix assassination, torture and terror program in Vietnam that claimed from 20,000 to 40,000 lives. The program was steeped in mind control operations, including the conducting of terminal experiments on VC prisoners-of-war.

Colby next served as the director of the CIA under President Richard Nixon, before being replaced in that post by President Gerald Ford with George Bush. Considering his past history, Colby was certainly an odd choice to lead an inquiry aimed at ascertaining the truth. Colby's finding, according to the Omaha World Herald, was that: "although the crash had some strange aspects, there was no specific evidence of sabotage."

As appalling as the trail of dead witnesses was the fact that the child victims, rather than the perpetrators, were thrown in prison. One of them, a young female victim named Alisha Owen, achieved the rather dubious honor of spending more time in solitary confinement than any woman in the history of the Nebraska penal system. She was sentenced to 9-25 years in prison for allegedly committing perjury, ten years longer than the sentence received by King for looting his financial institution of $40 million.

As DeCamp explained to the "Conspiracy of Silence" film crew: "For some reason, they had to send a signal to every kid who is a potential witness." Senator Schmit, who told the filmmakers that his career had been destroyed and that he had faced financial problems, believed that a clear signal was being sent to Nebraska politicians as well - a signal to not pursue the investigation any further.

A clearly disillusioned Schmit had this to say: "I used to be a firm believer that the system would work and that people who did things wrong would be punished. And we discovered victims who claimed to have been abused, and who the grand jury acknowledged had been abused, but they did not try to find out who had abused these individuals. Instead, they convicted Alisha Owen of perjury - indefensible from my point of view."

It would be a full decade before any of the victims received even a semblance of justice, and that would ultimately come not from a criminal court, but from a civil court. In early 1999, a judgment was entered against defendant Larry King in favor of plaintiff Paul Bonacci - one of the most seriously abused of the child victims, whose abuse at the hands of King began when he was just six years old and which included his forced collaboration in the production of child snuff films. The memorandum of the district court's decision, issued on February 22, 1999, reads as follows:

"Between December 1980 and 1988, the complaint alleges, the defendant King continually subjected the plaintiff to repeated sexual assaults, false imprisonments, infliction of extreme emotional distress, organized and directed satanic rituals, forced the plaintiff to 'scavenge' for children to be a part of the defendant King's sexual abuse and pornography ring, forced the plaintiff to engage in numerous sexual contacts with the defendant King and others and participate in deviate sexual games and masochistic orgies with other minor children. The defendant King's default has made those allegations true as to him ...

"The now uncontradicted evidence is that the plaintiff has suffered much. He has suffered burns, broken fingers, beatings of the head and face and other indignities by the wrongful actions of the defendant King. In addition to the misery of going through the experiences just related over a period of eight years, the plaintiff has suffered the lingering results to the present time. He is a victim of multiple personality disorder, involving as many as fourteen distinct personalities aside from his primary personality. He has given up a desired military career and received threats on his life. He suffers from sleeplessness, has bad dreams, has difficulty in holding a job, is fearful that others are following him, fears getting killed, has depressing flashbacks, and is verbally violent on occasion, all in connection with the multiple personality disorder and caused by the wrongful activities of the defendant King."

For his years of unspeakable abuse, physical and emotional suffering, and the complete shattering of his life, Bonacci was awarded one million dollars. While a bittersweet victory at best, it was considerably more than most other victims

of such abuse have gotten. The trial was significant for another reason as well; it revealed a glimpse of the connections between the King case and various other multi-victim abuse cases around the country.

[continued in part 6]