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 ¾ 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.
