Conservative Babylon

Claim to fame: Former associate director of presidential personnel under Ronald Reagan

Moral apex: Implicated in the Franklin Credit Union Child-Sex Ring Scandal (q.v.).

On June 29, 1989, the front page of Rev. Sun Myung Moon’s Washington Times blazed with the headline:

Homosexual prostitution inquiry
ensnares VIPs with Reagan, Bush
‘Call boys’ took midnight tour of White House
The Times reportedly got hold of “hundreds of credit-card vouchers” showing the purchase of “homosexual prostitute services” by a number of influential aides and advisors in both the Reagan and Bush I administrations, including:

• Charles K. Dutcher, former associate director of presidential personnel under Reagan;

• Paul R. Balach, political personnel liaison to the White House for Labor Secretary Elizabeth Dole (wife of former V.P. Bob Dole), former aide to Dan Quayle, and who, ironically, was once an aide to Robert Bauman, the disgraced Maryland Republican rep caught red-handed (so to speak) with a teenage boy;

• Todd A. Blodgett, Republican National Committee staffer whose job was to ferret out dirt on Democrats (also known as “opposition research”);

• Craig J. Spence, Republican lobbyist and…

…Washington socialite and international trade consultant… [who] spent upwards of $20,000 a month for male prostitutes who provided sex to him and his friends, said to include military personnel who also acted as his “bodyguards.” It was Mr. Spence who arranged the nocturnal tour of the Reagan White House.

The Times also fingered one of its own: Stanley Mark Tapscott, assistant managing editor of the Times until his resignation just nine days before the story broke.

Mr. Tapscott… said he had not procured homosexual escorts or sexual services of any kind. He said in an interview that he had talked to two women he arranged to meet through the escort service as part of an investigation of dial-a-porn services he had initiated a year earlier when he was editor of the newspaper’s Money section. … His editors knew of no such investigation. …

Before joining The Times, Mr. Tapscott worked for the Office of Personnel Management in the Reagan administration.

What the Times didn’t mention (yet) was the name of Lawrence E. King, manager of the Franklin Credit Union in Omaha, Nebraska.

How, you ask, could a Midwestern bank manager who looked like a 300-pound version of Al Sharpton on a drunken binge be mixed up with a White House callboy ring?

Well, it’s a long story.

In 1976, about eight years after the Franklin Credit Union was established, an accountant discovered some $400,000 missing from the books. In 1981, an anonymous letter tipped off the National Credit Union to the funny bookkeeping; an investigation confirmed that the funds were indeed missing, but nothing much came of the probe.

Yet.

In 1984, Edward Hobbs, a Franklin Credit teller wrote several letters, including one to the board of directors, alleging embezzlement. “The following day,” notes FranklinCase.org, “Hobbs was fired. Hobbs also supplied a letter to an Attorney and a Legislator. Their response to Hobbs was that ‘We’ve been watching Lawrence King for some time. We are aware of his living beyond his means. However, the Department can’t do anything because we don’t want to seem like the big bad white guy jumping on the tiny, black credit union.’”

Investigators apparently stopped worrying about being “the big bad white guy” in 1988; Franklin Credit was raided by the FBI and the IRS, and shut down. And it was about time, too; no longer was it just a measly four hundred grand missing: “After the closing,” says FranklinCase.org, “$37,000,000 in secret liabilities were discovered. Originally the Franklin Credit Union ledgers showed $2,600,000 in liabilities.” A few months later, this estimate was increased to $40 million.

King was indicted in May, 1989; rather than stand trial, he and his wife, Alice (also implicated in the whole mess) entered a plea bargain. Both went to prison; Alice served two years and was released in 1993; King was sentenced to 15 years but served less than 10, and was released in early 2001.

So, what does all this have to do with a White House callboy ring?

It seems that during the embezzlement probe, some nasty photographs surfaced at the Franklin Credit Union.

King — a Republican activist and “rising star” in the party, who sang the National Anthem at both the 1984 and 1988 Republican national conventions — when not busy diverting bank funds to his personal and political interests, was allegedly involved in procuring, or rather, allegedly kidnapping underage teens and turning them into prostitutes.

Now, we’re not telling you, or even asking you, to believe all this, or any of it (beyond the facts about the embezzlement case). We don’t believe a lot of what you’re about to read below. We’re just telling you what’s been reported by dozens of different sources over the past couple of decades.

The bottom line: Lawrence E. King, Jr., was believed to have operated a nationwide child-sex-slave ring.

Hang in there. It gets weirder.

The New York Times filed this report December 15, 1989:

The collapse of the credit union and the Government’s lawsuit alleging embezzlement were the extent of the case, at least on the public record, until last Monday. Then rumors that had been circulating in Omaha for much of the last month made their way into remarks presented to the Executive Board of the State Legislature in Lincoln. The speaker was State Senator Ernie Chambers of Omaha, who said he had received numerous reports, to which he clearly gave credence, that instances of child sexual and physical abuse were linked to the scandal. …

[P]articipants in a closed meeting that followed the Executive Board’s public session say he told of boys and girls, some of them from foster homes, who had been transported around the country by airplane to provide sexual favors, for which they were rewarded.

Republican Nebraska lawmaker John DeCamp “clearly gave credence” to these reports, too. In 2004, DeCamp told radio host Alex Jones:

I had just gotten out of the [state] Senate a year or so before when this started breaking. …

Stories started floating out as always happens when some incident like that occurs and some of the stories involved missing money that was used for this and that but some of those stories were even strange. They were coming from kids all over. Young kids — 16, 14, 13 — kids telling about how they had been on Larry’s private jet to this party or that party. Or that they had been at the Republican National Convention here or they had been at this political event in Washington and the stories had to do with they were there and were used as drug couriers. … And the kids also were telling these stranger tales that seemed bizarre at the time: that they had had sex or were involved in sex with this or that famous politician or businessman or whatever.

And I was one of the first ones who stood up and said this has got to be the most hilarious, ridiculous story I’ve ever heard. First of all, I knew Larry King. What the heck! … So I said, “It’s absurd.” Well the stories started cropping up more and more and I said something else and I said look if I believe even one of these crazy stories I’d be the first one to stand up and demand that something be done. Then I got a letter from a kid named Paul Bonacci who was in a jail in Omaha. And he said, “Look, if you come and talk to me, I can show you that these aren’t just fake tales.”

Continued the New York Times article:

Then the Omaha office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation acknowledged that it has independently received reports of sexual abuse and that they were a subject of its own criminal inquiry into the credit union affair. …

In the Executive Board’s public session Monday, Mr. Chambers said the activities of Lawrence E. King, Jr., the credit union’s manager for the last 18 years and the central figure in its collapse, were “just the tip of an iceberg, and he’s not in it by himself.”

“Before his arrest,” notes The Frances Farmers Revenge Web Portal:

…King had commuted often to Washington, D.C. He was a business partner in a call-boy operation run by the late Craig Spence… The [Washington Times] exposé was immediately occasioned by the resignation of an aide to Elizabeth Dole [Paul R. Balach]. In his resignation letter, [Balach] complained that one of Spence’s male prostitutes had blackmailed him with threats of disclosure. The Times reported that Spence, a former ABC reporter, was said to have been running a CIA blackmail operation: Spence’s Victorian Mansion on Wyoming Avenue, where he often threw parties for Washington’s power elite, was “planted with electronic bugs and video recording equipment that, according to homosexual call-boys and others who routinely visited the house, was used to make incriminating tapes to blackmail guests.” The parties were attended by the likes of William Casey, Ted Koppel, John Mitchell and Eric Severeid. A political tempest threatened when Spence’s credit card receipts implicated Reagan and Bush appointees, but few names reached the public print.

Four months after the story broke, Spence was found dead at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Boston. Police ruled his death a suicide.

Also rumored by numerous sources to be neck-deep in the prostitution scandal were then-Omaha Herald publisher Harold Andersen and then-University of Nebraska chancellor Ronald Roskens — another name deeply enmired in Republican politics.

Explains FFRWP:

Lawrence King had been one of [Roskens’] closest “advisers.” Roskens was fired from the position in 1989 when his involvement in homosexual orgies was reported to the university’s board of regents and verified by them. A year later, President George Bush called Roskens to Washington to head the Agency of International Development (AID), commonly utilized as a cover in CIA operations overseas. AID also disburses $7 billion in nonmilitary foreign aid, and thus wields enormous geopolitical power.

In 1992 a 107-page congressional report was issued by Rep. John Conyers Jr., urging Bush to fire Roskens, who had “abused the public trust” for private gain until AID’s inspector general “forced a change in his patterns of behavior.” His “patterns,” according to the Washington Post for October 2, 1992, included “taking thousands of dollars from outside organizations, including some that do business with AID.”

In the words of Ernie Chambers, King was indeed “just the tip of an iceberg.” Countless other names of note pop up repeatedly in connection with the story, and allegations go far beyond child-sex-slavery and into the realm of satanic ritual abuse, and even murder and necrophilia.

And that’s where we’re going to stop before we get so deep we need hipwaders. It’s not that we have no interest in the story, or that we have any qualms about relaying the worst details; it’s simply that we’re not sure how much of this we believe.

After all, when victims start accusing Hunter S. Thompson of making a snuff film of underage callboys at Bohemian Grove…

Yes, that’s alleged by Paul Bonacci, the most prominent King accuser, and purported victim of “mind control.”

And that’s where our suspension of disbelief really starts to falter. We’re getting into “The CIA implanted microchips in my brain!” territory, and we don’t want to go there. We like a good conspiracy theory as much as anyone, but we also know there’s a lot of mentally disturbed individuals who really believe in… well, things for which there is no proof.

We’re not saying none of the story is true — where’s there’s smoke, there’s usually fire — but we also think there’s a good reason a Nebraska grand jury called the whole story “a carefully crafted hoax.”

On the other hand, DeCamp reportedly won a $1 million judgment against King on behalf of Bonacci. So, go figure who’s telling the truth, and who isn’t.

Anyway, the story has been covered elsewhere, repeatedly, by researchers whose efforts far outweigh ours.

With all that’s out there, we could easily write a book on the scandal — but we don’t have to, because somebody already did: The Franklin Cover-Up: Child Abuse, Satanism, and Murder in Nebraska by the aforementioned John DeCamp — who takes every word of Paul Bonacci as the gospel truth.

In his 2004 interview with Alex Jones, DeCamp said:

[A]s a young kid his uncle or grandfather or somebody had taught him [Bonacci] religiously to keep a diary where you mark things down everyday. Well, he did it and he did it in detail. So when I went and visited with him and he told me these strange tales and then you had the head of psychiatry from one of the major medical institutions in the state say, “Hey, this kid he ain’t crazy. He’s a multiple personality and he’s probably telling the truth because multiples don’t need to lie. They just switch personalities.”

Anyway, so to make a long, long bizarre story short. I found out that he was in jail because he had been one of those intimately involved in all this, and he had to be shut up real quick. …

If you want the rest of the dirt, in all its midboggling confusion (connecting the callboy ring to everything from Skull and Bones to the death of former CIA director William Colby to the Freemasons), we suggest you start with these articles and Web sites (you’ll find plenty of links to lead you even further into the mess):

• FranklinCase.org

• The Franklin Coverup Scandal, The Law Party

• The Washington Child Sex Ring Coverup, Vox News

• George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography: Chapter -XXI- Omaha, Webster G. Tarpley & Anton Chaitkin

• The Franklin Scandal Tried in Civil Court, The Seventh Fire

One last bizarre note: It’s been thought that there’s a connection between the Franklin Credit Union scandal and the Jeff Gannon / James Guckert prostitution scandal.

Is your head spinning yet? Try this on for size: There’s speculation that Gannon/Guckert is actually Johnny Gosch, an alleged satanic-ritual victim who was supposedly abducted while delivering the Sunday paper in Des Moines, Iowa, in 1982.

Not only that, but Gannon/Guckert may not even know he’s really Johnny Gosch, thanks to CIA “brainwashing.”

The Des Moines Register sums it up:

The Iowa paperboy was kidnapped in 1982, with unsubstantiated stories emerging later from his mother that he was abducted into a child pedophilia ring. No trace of him has ever been found, and no suspects have been arrested.

Nearly 23 years later, White House correspondent Jeff Gannon, who wrote for a conservative Web site, was exposed in February as James D. Guckert, a man with no journalism experience and links to several gay escort addresses online.

If you have the time to read a few hundred Web postings, you will see how Johnny Gosch and Jeff Gannon, two completely unrelated individuals, became the same person on the Web. …

It took the random efforts of scores of Web loggers (bloggers), credulous readers and longtime followers of the case to assign the two men a bizarre, shared backstory involving satanic CIA agents, pedophiles and presidents. And, of course, [Rush] Limbaugh. …

The complete concoction goes like this: Gosch was kidnapped into a pedophilia and child pornography ring that serviced the upper echelons of Washington, D.C., society. He was brainwashed by the CIA, trained to be part of a top-secret escort program. Then, he became Jeff Gannon and was given a plum job as a White House correspondent with the online conservative news service to keep him quiet. …

Despite the story’s more ludicrous subplots, a few coincidences seem eerie — the matching cheek marks, the coincidental names, the sexual overtones of the scandals. Add in the rumor that Johnny Gosch’s mother, Noreen, declared Gannon was her son, and it’s no wonder that some bloggers stuck by the story.

In reality, she says she’s not convinced either way.

Several facts, however, do not add up. Gosch and Gannon/Guckert would be 12 years apart in age. Gannon is 48, and Gosch would be 35. …

But if you want to believe something, and you’ve got the catchall reasoning that the CIA can alter anything, it’s not hard to brush aside such discrepancies. …

— Erin Crawford
Is he Johnny Gosch?
Des Moines Register
April 5, 2005

(The “coincidental names” remark refers to the fact that the editor of the Des Moines Register at the time Gosch disappeared was one Jim Gannon.)

Whatever the truth, about anything, people like John DeCamp are sold on the whole child-slavery/satanic-ritual story:

This isn’t a fantasy. …

You know, I know people listening right now will think this is la la land, this is make-believe, these are fruitcakes talking about this. This couldn’t happen — particularly, with prominent people. They wouldn’t be diddling little kids and wouldn’t be… Well, unfortunately, I also believe that. I guess I still want to believe that. But I’ll guarantee you some bad things have happened out there. They do happen. One of the coincidences that I think is going to rock some people here very shortly is one of the centerpieces of this thing was using a lot of kids out of a place called Boys Town. …

I’m not much of a conspiracy theorist. I just kind of look at the lay of the land and pretty much accept it the way it is…

Karmic Komeback: Paul Balach was stupid enough to apparently fall head-over-heels with one of the callboys, Jason Michael Manos, giving Manos free use of his credit cards, and even signing over power of attorney. While Balach was out of the country, Manos cleaned him out (and wrecked his car). “That was a nightmare in my life,” said Balach, blaming “loneliness, laziness” for his own stupidity. When the scandal came to light, he was forced to resign. He said he wasn’t “allowed” to speak with his boss, Libby Dole, about the incident.

Fun facts:

• “In 1972,” reported the New York Times, “[King] headed a national political organization, Black Democrats for George McGovern. But he gained greater prominence after he had switched parties a while later, serving for a time as vice chairman of the National Black Republican Council, an official affiliate of the Republican Party, and becoming a familiar figure on the Republican social scene.”

• A documentary, Conspiracy of Silence, that is said to have been scheduled to air on the Discovery Channel (but was supposedly suppressed) called the story “a cancer at the heart of America, and of its continuing coverup at its highest levels.” You can watch it via streaming video here.

Bible reading for… Oh, forget it. If any of this story is at all true, we’d just have to throw the entire Bible at all the participants.