Chance903 ago

I have to tell you this has gone on a very long time and crosses party lines. I am going to copy something for you. I am posting it because I believe that it is somehow connected and relivent...the roots are so deep. SEPTEMBER 10, 2012 Still Evil After All These Years by CHARLES YOUNG

Email

I have known Nick Bryant since 1995. He was new to New York from Minnesota then, and looking to make a jump from science reporting in technical journals to writing for a mass audience. I noticed that he was persistent and ethically motivated and I thought, “He might be a good reporter.” We got to be friends, and had many long discussions about the nature of evil, which was his preferred subject matter as he tried to make a move into general circulation magazines. When he wasn’t chasing doctors at AIDS conferences, he was chasing outlaw bikers and Satanists.

On one such foray in 2002, he stumbled on a scandal that I had never heard of. The scandal centered around the Franklin Community Federal Credit Union, which was created to serve a poor black neighborhood in Omaha, Nebraska. During the 70s and 80s, its manager, a man named Larry King (not the talk show host), ran the Franklin as a Ponzi scheme and looted over $40 million, which he spent on an opulent lifestyle and Republican fundraising. King sang the National Anthem at the Republican convention in 1984 and served on several committees of the National Black Republican Council. He had a townhouse in Washington, DC, where he threw parties with many prominent guests. In August 1988, he threw a $100,000 party at the Republican convention, and appeared in a video in which he and Jack Kemp urged blacks to vote for George H. W. Bush. In November 1988, his Ponzi scheme crashed and the Franklin was shut down by the National Credit Union Association and the FBI.

All run-of-the-mill scandal stuff, and uncontroversial in the basic facts, except that as King was climbing into the upper levels of the national Republican hierarchy, Omaha was boiling over with rumors that he was also running a pedophile ring, pandering children out to rich and powerful men in Omaha, even flying the children to Washington, Los Angeles and New York for orgiastic, abusive parties with even richer and more powerful men.

The late 80s and 90s were rough years for people to make accusations of pedophilia. Media of the left and right alike were debunking an array of scandals involving nursery schools around the country (most notoriously the McMartin Preschool in California). The charges of child abuse were often bizarre as well as horrifying, and were ultimately dismissed in court as Salem witch trial hysteria and the accused exonerated. “False memory syndrome” entered the language as a new psychological disorder and proved useful for understanding odd claims of “recovered memory” in many areas.

It was not until 2002, when the Boston Globe ran a courageous series on pedophiliac abuse by Catholic priests, that the national climate started to change. As more and more stories appeared in other outlets, it became clear and widely accepted that the Catholic church had been harboring thousands of pedophile priests around the world for decades, if not centuries. It was ghastly, and it wasn’t a witch hunt, and the revelations keep coming to this day (do a search on “Catholic priest” and “abuse”). It’s barely news anymore, but the stories are relentless. There was little or no “false memory syndrome” among the claims.

Recently, the country was stunned again by the Gerry Sandusky case at Penn State. LIke the Catholic Church, the Penn State football program was an unchallengeable, straight-arrow, totalitarian hierarchy that valued itself more than the lives of children who were being raped by an outrageously flamboyant pedophile. Outside of a few extreme Penn State football fans, nobody had a hard time seeing that something had gone terribly wrong, and that it had gone wrong for a long time because the victims had enormous difficulty coming forward and people in authority didn’t want to believe what was happening before their eyes.

But in Omaha during the first Bush presidency, with the nursery school scandals losing credibility around the country, almost the entire Omaha establishment closed ranks to discredit the accusers. By establishment, I mean the Omaha Police Department, Nebraska State Police, FBI, local and state judiciary, local and state and national media. Against them stood a few teenagers, most of them with drug problems, long rap sheets and traumatized brains. Their allies were some foster care supervisors and parents, plus a divided investigative committee in the Nebraska legislature. Under phenomenal pressure, the teenagers either retracted their testimony of sexual abuse or were crushed in court and sentenced to years in prison for perjury. Key figures in the case ended up dead in numbers that would astound any actuary but apparently interested no one in Omaha law enforcement.

Many years after all this was seemingly resolved in court, my friend Nick decided in 2002 it was a story. I confess that I tried to discourage him. It wasn’t timely, I said. The pedophiles were still out there in the news today, he said. Nobody’s going to believe it, I said. But there’s been an injustice, he said. You’re going to end up dead in a motel room, I said. That’s not definite, he said.

Nobody accepted his proposals for a magazine article, so he started making trips to Nebraska on his own dime. Nobody accepted the complete magazine article he subsequently wrote. He decided to write a book and made more trips to Nebraska.

I told him that the best possible outcome would be that the book was completely ignored. Look what happened to Gary Webb, I said. The New York Times and Washington Post ran him out of journalism for exposing the CIA connection to cocaine smuggling. Webb committed suicide. There’s nothing a major newspaper hates more than a scoop, I said, unless it’s a scoop that exposes the major newspaper blew another story of grave importance. But the story is true, Nick said again, and the real villains are still out there.

Nobody in New York accepted Nick’s book proposal. He went to Nebraska yet more times to nail the reporting, hauled back mountains of evidence, tracked down many victims who had never spoken out before, and wrote the book, which pretty much wrecked him financially. The book, The Franklin Scandal: A Story of Powerbrokers, Child Abuse and Betrayal, came out in hardcover in 2009. It was published by a small house far from New York, Trine Day in Oregon. The paperback, slightly revised for greater readability, is coming out next month.

I should say here that I helped Nick with editing at various points, and he has done work for me in other contexts. And we are, as I say, friends. So I’m obviously not a disinterested party.

I should also say that I’ve looked at his evidence, listened to interviews, sorted through 200 receipts for planes chartered by Larry King with five-to-eight unnamed passengers, and I’ve read the book carefully. I can think of no innocent explanation for why King would be flying children, some of them spirited out of the Catholic orphanage Boys Town, around the United States, mostly to Washington. I’ve listened to Nick at great length on the phone about all of this as he was reporting. I have listened to him in the immediate aftermath of strange phone calls and death threats over the years.

This isn’t “conspiracy theory.” It’s one of the best investigative books I’ve ever read. If it’s true, then there are significant elements in America’s ruling class that are depraved beyond Caligula’s dreams. And I don’t see how it isn’t true.

Parts of the The Franklin Scandal read like a great crime novel. Parts of it read like Nick was trying to build an impregnable legal fortress of fact to make his case stick, which can slow down the story a bit, but as the facts come together, it is staggering.

The book has two main heroes, Gary Caradori and Alisha Owen. An honored veteran of the Nebraska State Police and private detective, Caradori was chief investigator for the legislative committee. He tracked down Larry King’s reputed photographer in Chicago and flew his private plane there to retrieve incriminating photographs (pedophiles do love their porn). On his return flight, Caradori’s plane blew up in mid-air and the photographs were never found. The wreckage was spread over a wide area on a farm. The FAA was ruled that Caradori had lost control of his plane for an “unknown reason.”

kingkongwaswrong ago

There is already a sticky, if you didn't notice it I can't help you.

kingkongwaswrong ago

  1. you can't sticky more than one thread here, so I've made a single sticky that points to many resources
  2. if you want something added, write it up and link me to it, I've said this.

thats all we can do. if you want to be more organised, contribute with a thread that pulls together information, no one is going to spoon feed you. if the content is good it will make it to front page and i can also link it in the sticky.

I_Miss_Phone_Phreaks ago

Somebody correct me if I'm wrong but if the mods of the sub make /v/pizzagate have a minimum CCP to downvoat (within the sub) it will be removed from v/all and relieve the damage to the front page. Or make a /v/pizzagate_leads (with the minimum CCP rule). It'll be kept off v/all (making the rest of voat cleaner and then keep /v/pizzagate as a confirmed information sub for the normies to come find out what's going on in a more concise/coherent fashion.

I could've missed the point of what you're trying to accomplish with this thread as I am a square.

R4WX ago

i dont mean the v/all top page, i mean the v/pizzagate top page. It's a total mess, no structure.

Zinnsee ago

To all the new goats out there: We like minimal moderation over here, it's the reason most of us gathered in this place in the first place. Yeah, it is unorganized and a lot of stuff to read through, but this issue is no hipster fad that will be over in a few weeks. This shit has been going on for decades and they were always able to cover it up until now. This is much bigger than some pedos in a pizza joint. So it is worth it to spend some time reading.

There is always the possibility to start a new more focused subverse or even just a link to a more compressed version of the findings so far. I'm pretty sure @kingkongwaswrong would add a sticky to the front page for quality content.

R4WX ago

That's okay and I understandthat , but as @kingkongwaswrong said himself, he has never been a moderator and didn't really intended to be one. But the fact is that we have to change something, at the moment this is just thousands of people posting everything they can find being somehow related to pizza. And that's fine if it makes sense, but since everybody does that there is no chance to focus on something and trying to finish it so we can move on to another topic and investigate more. Everyone is starting something, posting it here, in hopes of someone else to look into it aswell, but no one does, because there is to much coming at the same time. It's a mess.

This is way to important to handle it lightly. We have to focus and unite. A huge swarm of fishs can be scary enough to scare a shark. Just one alone get's eaten.

We got this!

R4WX ago

Could you guys spread this maybe? Atleast link the thread. It's already on the second page of new, therefore not many people will be going through it. This can't be dismissed.

knight222 ago

Where are the mods??

R4WX ago

good question..

DontVanMeBro ago

I can volunteer to Mod, if you guys need. I was DontVanMeBro on reddit as well.

R4WX ago

Vote this up so more people will see and can bring in their ideas. The other thing with the mods is that we have to be very careful not to give it to someone being a shill or worse..

justice4all ago

@kingkongwaswrong I volunteer as mod I have buckets of free time to constantly monitor this sub and make sure its well maintained and I will make sure all our newcomers come to this sub and be well properly informed. My username on reedit is justice4all777

pleasedontsuicideme ago

Agreed. I volunteer as tribute to be a mod to help organize. I'm pleasedontsuicideme on reddit, too, if anyone wants to check my history (it is a throwaway).

Naalu ago

Yeah i agree