The Unknown Known: The Life and Times of Donald Rumsfeld is a 2013 documentary directed by Errol Morris, similar to his 2003 documentary The Fog of War about Robert McNamara, the controversial US Secretary of Defense from 1961 to 1968 during the Vietnam War. Rumsfeld was US Secretary of Defense from January 20, 2001 to December 18, 2006 with a similar level of controversy over his handling of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks and subsequent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. With the United States embroiled in a hot proxy war with Russia in Ukraine, it is perhaps time to revisit some lessons from previous wars such as Vietnam and Iraq.
The Unknown Known does not feature the feel good self-help platitudes used in The Fog of War. Rumsfeld’s manner is blunter and more aggressive than McNamara. Like Fog of War with McNamara, The Unknown Known paints a picture of Rumsfeld as a well meaning, arrogant genius lost in his own intellectual and ideological fantasy world. This is done by pairing excerpts from lengthy interviews with Rumsfeld with contradictory news footage and video from some of Rumsfeld’s numerous, sometimes combative press conferences on the Iraq war. Rumsfeld for example is shown denying the George W. Bush Administration ever claimed Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein backed Al Qaeda in the interviews paired with a press conference where he appears to clearly assert exactly this.
Rumsfeld’s Mysterious Motive
One ought to wonder, especially since The Fog of War was released in 2003, why a smart, shrewd bureaucrat and politician like Rumsfeld would set himself up for a similar hatchet job to McNamara’s unflattering portrayal in Fog of War. There are of course many excellent conservative documentarians capable of producing either a shameless puff piece or a more credible documentary with a few carefully selected and answered hard questions presenting Rumsfeld in a much more flattering light. Indeed, the Unknown Known ends with Errol Morris asking Rumsfeld why he agreed to the interview/documentary, perhaps to mollify the many more insightful viewers who should be asking themselves this question.
Rumsfeld: That is a vicious question. I’ll be darned if I know.
In 2011, Rumsfeld published a 834 page book Known and Unknown: A Memoir complete with a web site and links to electronic copies of many of his memos as Secretary of Defense. He seems to have engaged in a PR campaign for the book at the same time, including a combative interview with Abderrahim Foukara of Al Jazeera.
The Unknown Known documentary seems scripted and edited to confirm the prejudices and stereotypes of liberal Democrat intellectuals who read the New York Times, listen to NPR, and rarely question what they read or hear unless it is a guest opinion piece by someone like Rumsfeld. Surely Rumsfeld expected this, so indeed why give the interview? What is in it for Rumsfeld?
A Failure of Imagination
That said, Morris lets Rumsfeld get away with some whoppers. Speaking about the September 11, 2022 terrorist attacks, Rumsfeld attributes the debacle and Pearl Harbor both to a “Failure of Imagination.” Not just Rumsfeld, but historical footage and CGI animations in the documentary imply no one anticipated the Japanese could or would launch a successful attack on the US Pacific fleet in Pearl Harbor. This of course is and was total nonsense.
Up until late 1940, the US Pacific Fleet operated out of the port of San Pedro in southern California — not Pearl Harbor, a much safer location than Pearl Harbor, under the command of Admiral James Richardson. President Roosevelt “temporarily” sent the fleet to Pearl Harbor for “two weeks” that soon turned into a permanent relocation. Richardson challenged the decision, writing a report outlining in large measure the Japanese attack that happened. He was fired by Roosevelt and replaced by Admiral Husband Kimmel who Roosevelt then blamed for the disaster. Roosevelt and his staff had been warned very specifically of the dangers of a surprise aerial attack by the Japanese months before Pearl Harbor.
Similarly, the US Air Force and other agencies had performed several simulations of terrorist attacks in which planes were hijacked and flown into buildings prior to September 11, 2001. Astonishingly, simulations of hijacking scenarios were under way on September 11, 2001, apparently contributing to the confusion during the attack: “is this a simulation or real?” The Air Force would go on to repeatedly change their stories about the failure of the air defense system on September 11, 2001. Despite his hard nosed image, Rumsfeld never seems to have conducted a tough, thorough investigation into the failure, instead citing bogus “failure of the imagination” excuses.
According to the official story — the 9/11 Commission report — Flight 77 turned off its transponder — surely a red flag — over forty minutes before it struck the Pentagon. It proceeded to fly off course to the Pentagon, the US Capitol City, at an altitude allegedly over 30,000 feet in full view of the multi-billion dollar active air defense radars — they do not require a transponder — which are supposed to track and intercept nuclear bombers from Russia and other threats. Yet the fighter planes stationed at Andrews Air Force base only miles from the Pentagon and several other air bases around DC failed to intercept the plane. Nor did any of the presumed classified defenses, surface to air missiles, etc. around Washington DC stop the plane which in fact could have contained nerve gas, biological agents or even a nuclear weapon.
Given the active air defense radars, the main reason to turn off the transponder seems to be that one plans to fly under the radar, have a way to jam the active radars, or have some other way to become invisible to the active air defense radars. Did something like this happen? If so, why has it never been disclosed?
Torture Porn
A large section of the documentary dwells on the alleged torture of Guantanamo prisoners which Rumsfeld largely blames on the CIA and the Department of Justice which authored the notorious memos justifying torture and the Abu Ghraib scandal clearly conducted by DoD soldiers and not the CIA. Rumsfeld concedes abuses occurred, he was “the captain of the ship” and responsible, and claims to have offered his resignation to President Bush after the scandal broke — which Bush refused. The documentary shows what appear to be segments of a hand written resignation note.
This certainly beats Robert McNamara who managed to disclaim any responsibility for anything that went wrong in the Vietnam War in The Fog of War.
But are BDSM abuses perpetrated by enlisted men and women, allegedly acting without orders or directions from above really the most serious problems during Rumsfeld’s reign?
Conclusion
Why does a shrewd, tough politician, bureaucrat, and sometime corporate CEO like Donald Rumsfeld grant a lengthy interview for a documentary that paints him as a delusional whacko? Especially when the documentarian has done this before to a previous Secretary of Defense who mismanaged a previous disastrous war? I’ll be darned if I know. 🙂 One should however strongly suspect a hidden agenda.
(C) 2022 by John F. McGowan, Ph.D.
About Me
John F. McGowan, Ph.D. solves problems using mathematics and mathematical software, including developing gesture recognition for touch devices, video compression and speech recognition technologies. He has extensive experience developing software in C, C++, MATLAB, Python, Visual Basic and many other programming languages. He has been a Visiting Scholar at HP Labs developing computer vision algorithms and software for mobile devices. He has worked as a contractor at NASA Ames Research Center involved in the research and development of image and video processing algorithms and technology. He has published articles on the origin and evolution of life, the exploration of Mars (anticipating the discovery of methane on Mars), and cheap access to space. He has a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a B.S. in physics from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech).
With President Biden invoking Armageddon and the United States embroiled in a hot proxy war with Russia, the other major nuclear superpower, in the Ukraine, the lessons of Vietnam may be especially relevant today. The Fog of War is a 2003 video documentary on the career of former US Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara (1916-2009) primarily focusing on the Vietnam War in which 58,220 Americans and many more Vietnamese, Cambodians, and Laotians perished. The war had a reported cost of $168 billion in 1960’s dollars ($950 billion in 2011 dollars). McNamara was Secretary of Defense under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson from 1961 to 1968. He has been widely criticized for his leadership of the war effort. It is sometimes presented as a mea culpa by McNamara.
The documentary is essentially an interview with McNamara, eighty-seven (87) at the time, interspersed with historical news footage that sometimes contradicts McNamara’s often opaque — one might say foggy — answers. In many respects it seems like a non-apology apology in which McNamara makes hazy statements that in fact avoid responsibility, passing the buck repeatedly to his former boss Curtis LeMay, President Johnson, unnamed subordinates (for the decision to use the Agent Orange “herbicide” in Vietnam), and others while sounding deeply but vaguely concerned about his fellow man. It is structured as a self-help video for future generations with eleven lessons from McNamara — all the sort of general mostly feel-good platitudes common in self help materials: e.g. “Empathize with your enemies” — a touchy-feely variant of the old standby “Know your enemies.”
At no point does McNamara say something like: ” I made decision X. In retrospect it was a bad decision and I regret it.” In discussing the controversy over Agent Orange, he says some people think the chemical was dangerous, implies someone else made the decision to use it, says he cannot recall who made the decision, and expresses vague concern, not really regret, that it was used during his tenure as Secretary of Defense. He does not discuss the taboo on use of chemical weapons in warfare that grew out of their use in World War I, a taboo that even Nazi Germany which had developed nerve gases far deadlier than the weapons used in WWI obeyed during WW2. Surely there should have been a cabinet level review — with the President and Secretary of Defense (McNamara) involved — of any decision to use a chemical weapon.
Good Cop, Bad Cop?
Good cop/bad cop is a psychological tactic used in negotiation and interrogation, in which a team of two people take opposing approaches interrogating their subject. One interrogator adopts a hostile or accusatory demeanor, emphasizing threats of punishment, while the other adopts a more sympathetic demeanor, emphasizing reward, in order to convince the subject to cooperate.
The “bad cop” takes an aggressive, negative stance towards the subject, making blatant accusations, derogatory comments, threats, and in general creating antipathy with the subject. This sets the stage for the “good cop” to act sympathetically, appearing supportive and understanding, and in general showing sympathy for the subject. The good cop defends the subject from the bad cop. The subject may feel able to cooperate with the good cop, either out of trust or out of fear of the bad cop and may then seek protection by the good cop and provide the information the interrogators are seeking. The order can also be reversed. When performed in this manner, the good cop will try to gain a subject’s trust. If that fails, the bad cop will intimidate the subject to make them crack under pressure
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_cop/bad_cop
In many respects, McNamara’s interview and the documentary reflect what seems to be the modern liberal Democrat Party line on the Vietnam War — and the more recent Iraq War II. Something like: the Vietnam War was a mistake. Kennedy and Johnson meant well. Nixon didn’t. JFK and LBJ were browbeaten and misinformed into the debacle by hard line and often dishonest military and CIA leaders such as Air Force General Curtis LeMay whom McNamara paints as an ogre, CIA Director Allen Dulles, General William Westmoreland, failed Republican 1964 Presidential candidate Barry Goldwater, and others. Once Nixon became President, the naive ineffective but much smarter and more caring Democrats “woke up” and abandoned the war.
In 1964 Lyndon Johnson ran as a peace candidate against the crazed maniac war Republican war hawk Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater. The documentary has a brief clip of Goldwater stating bluntly that the US is in a war in Vietnam and the administration is lying to the public, which indeed seems to have been true.
In August of 1964, only three months before the Presidential election, there was an alleged series of incidents in the Gulf of Tonkin near Vietnam where the North Vietnamese allegedly “attacked” the US fleet. These attacks seem to have killed or injured no one and caused either no or minimal damage. McNamara discusses the “attacks” assuring the viewers that yes the “attack” on August 2 occurred but the second attack on August 4 was apparently a “mistake” by somebody, not him obviously. Usually the term “attack” brings up thoughts of events like the September 11, 2001 attacks that killed almost 3,000 Americans or Pearl Harbor with 2,403 deaths in 1941.
Nonetheless, President Johnson seized upon the “attacks” and gave a speech to the US population seeming to claim the US was bombing North Vietnam as he was speaking, which would have required the planes to be airborne from their base in the Pacific before the alleged second attack. Not surprisingly Barry Goldwater pointed out the timing problem and was ridiculed. Goldwater would give several speeches during the election campaign questioning the incidents and suggesting a coverup.
In the Fog of War McNamara’s vague assertions about the incident and audio tapes played by the documentary suggest Johnson and McNamara may have been misled by either incompetent or willfully deceptive military officers who sound rather unsure of their own claims. Since 1964, tapes have been released indicating Johnson and McNamara privately had doubts about the incidents, which nonetheless did not delay or moderate the immediate statements to the public or the reported counter-attack, the bombing.
Of course, with no casualties, the President and Secretary of Defense could easily have released a reassuring statement through the Presidential spokesman indicating there had been a possible minor incident with no casualties and the US was investigating to determine what actually happened before responding.
The highly publicized attacks with no casualties increased fears of war during the election campaign and seem to have helped Johnson’s campaign against the right wing hawk Goldwater. Johnson was the good cop and Goldwater the bad cop — whether by design or accident. The Gulf of Tonkin resolution giving the administration a carte blanche for war in Vietnam was passed on August 10, 1964 with strong bipartisan support, not unlike the recent resolution to support Ukraine.
McNamara also seems to use the good cop/bad cop routine in his discussion of the Cuban Missile Crisis with his former boss Curtis Le May as the crazed “bad cop” warmonger planning World War III. By comparison, JFK and McNamara seem reasonable. We are led to think: Thank God Curtis Le May was not in charge. There is no discussion of the convenient timing of the crisis which boosted JFK’s approval ratings dramatically, only weeks before the November, 1962 mid-term elections.
Fog of War or Smokescreen?
Both McNamara’s answers on camera and the documentary emphasize McNamara’s brilliance: a top student before attending Berkeley, an Irish kid atypically outcompeting smart Jewish, Chinese, and Japanese students at Piedmont High School in Piedmont, CA, a top student at Berkeley, attending Harvard business school, a key aide to Curtis Le May during World War II, and whiz kid at Ford before being tapped as Secretary of Defense by JFK. Yet this self-described genius (I think he probably was a genius) repeatedly passes the buck by portraying himself and his boss, tough Texas politician Lyndon Johnson, as naive simpletons repeatedly hoodwinked and even intimidated by subordinates. Who us? We were only in charge!
Lessons for Ukraine?
While the Fog of War’s eleven self-help platitudes are of little practical value in the modern crisis, there is a sobering lesson, not a new one.
Governments, including specifically highly educated, intellectual liberal Democrats who preach peace and brotherly love, frequently lie, blatantly and on serious matters such as war and peace, sometimes just to win the next election — no matter the subsequent costs to the nation or the world. Super smart officials like Robert McNamara lie and are often excellent liars and masters of double talk. They get away with it too; McNamara was rewarded with a Presidential Medal of Freedom and a cushy, highly paid job as President of the World Bank from 1968 to 1981.
(C) 2022 by John F. McGowan, Ph.D.
About Me
John F. McGowan, Ph.D. solves problems using mathematics and mathematical software, including developing gesture recognition for touch devices, video compression and speech recognition technologies. He has extensive experience developing software in C, C++, MATLAB, Python, Visual Basic and many other programming languages. He has been a Visiting Scholar at HP Labs developing computer vision algorithms and software for mobile devices. He has worked as a contractor at NASA Ames Research Center involved in the research and development of image and video processing algorithms and technology. He has published articles on the origin and evolution of life, the exploration of Mars (anticipating the discovery of methane on Mars), and cheap access to space. He has a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a B.S. in physics from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech).
Subscribe to our free Weekly Newsletter for articles and videos on practical mathematics, Internet Censorship, ways to fight back against censorship, and other topics by sending an email to: subscribe [at] mathematical-software.com
John F. McGowan, Ph.D. solves problems using mathematics and mathematical software, including developing gesture recognition for touch devices, video compression and speech recognition technologies. He has extensive experience developing software in C, C++, MATLAB, Python, Visual Basic and many other programming languages. He has been a Visiting Scholar at HP Labs developing computer vision algorithms and software for mobile devices. He has worked as a contractor at NASA Ames Research Center involved in the research and development of image and video processing algorithms and technology. He has published articles on the origin and evolution of life, the exploration of Mars (anticipating the discovery of methane on Mars), and cheap access to space. He has a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a B.S. in physics from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech).
The 1980’s were the decade of serial killers. Serial killers were in the news, Hollywood movies, bestselling novels like Thomas Harris’s Red Dragon and Silence of the Lambs, and True Crime books. The serial killer craze overlapped with fears of missing children, hysteria about the Dungeons and Dragons role playing game, and tales of Satanic Ritual Abuse — themes exploited in Netflix’s hit 80s nostalgia show Stranger Things.
The craze started in the 1970s with high profile serial killer cases such as Ted Bundy and John Wayne Gacy and continued into the early 1990s with the hit Silence of the Lambsmovie starring Jodie Foster (the fifth highest grossing movie in 1991) and the notorious Jeffrey Dahmer cannibal serial killer case.
The Silence of the Lambs Movie Poster (1991)
In the last three decades serial killers have waned in the news and public consciousness. The 1980s is often remembered for a Satanic Panic, a supposedly entirely unfounded hysteria about Satanism, ritual abuse in day care centers and Satanic serial killers. Henry Lee Lucas’s once widely repeated claims to have killed six-hundred people as a contract killer for a Satanic cult have been largely dismissed as fantasy.
A US Senate committee and the FBI produced an estimate in 1983 of about 3,600 Americans possibly murdered in 1981 by serial killers, rounded up to 4-5,000 in some news media reports. In 1984 the FBI rolled the number back to about ten percent of all murders, or about 540 Americans possibly murdered by serial killers in a year. Scholars challenged the FBI and government figures as grossly exaggerating the number of murders by serial killers. (see Using Murder: The Social Construction of Serial Homicide by Philip Jenkins for an in depth discussion of the statistics.)
Was the 1980s Serial Killer Wave Real?
Was there even a wave of serial killer cases or was the serial killer wave the product of news coverage and clever marketing by the FBI’s Behavioral Sciences Unit? Have serial killer cases declined in frequency and — if so — why?
Wikipedia’s List of serial killers in the United States purports to be a comprehensive list of known serial killers in the United States with names, dates, and numbers of proven and possible victims from the 1700s to the present (data table downloaded on August 21, 2022).
Indeed this Wikipedia database shows a dramatic surge in serial killers peaking in the early to mid 1980’s and declining back to historically very low levels in the 1990s through the present. This surge is clear in all cases, serial killers with five or more known victims, and even the rare serial killers with ten or more known victims such as Jeffrey Dahmer.
WHY?
The serial killer surge occurred during a period of almost no executions with a complete cessation for four years after the 1972 Furman versus George Supreme Court cast. As executions ramped back up in the 1990’s serial killer cases dropped.
This plot shows executions of serial killers between 1950 and 2020, with about 115 executed out of a total of 553 from the Wikipedia list. These are particularly heinous crimes often involving sadistic torture of victims. Serial killers face a much higher probability of execution than the typical murderer.
One can see executions had dropped to almost zero by 1966, well before the 1972 Furman versus Georgia Supreme Court case that completely stopped executions until 1976. Many of the few executions during the 1970s were murderers who wanted or claimed they wanted to be executed such as Utah’s Gary Gilmore case. Executions began to rise slowly in 1982 reaching a post 1972 peak in 1998.
The green line shows the overall United States Homicide Rate in Homicides per Million Americans. The homicide rate is usually quoted as homicides per 100,000 (100K). Per million is used to make the scale comparable to the other key data series in the plot. The overall murder rate doubles during this period, dropping back to historical levels in the 1990’s as executions rose back to late 1950, early 1960s levels.
The light blue bars show the proven victims of named serial killers from the Wikipedia list. The shorter dark blue bars show the number of active named serial killers. The list often gives a range of years when the killer was active, e.g. 1982-1986. The proven victims and the serial killer are assigned to the mid-point of the range for simplicity, e.g. 1984. The number of active serial killers by year, defined in this way, is inversely correlated with the execution rate: more executions, fewer serial killers.
The yellow bars show the number of victims of mass shootings from Wikipedia’s List of mass shootings in the United States (data tables downloaded on August 24, 2022). The number of mass shooting victims has climbed as the number of executions has dropped since the 1998 peak while the number of serial killer victims has remained low.
The plot below shows the US named serial killer proven victims per year versus the execution rate, executions per 150 million Americans. We can see that the maximum number of proven victims drops exponentially with the execution rate. At low execution rates, there is significant unexplained variation in the number — suggestion other factors at play when executions are rare or nonexistent.
The plot below shows the US Murder Victims per 100,000 Americans per year versus the execution rate, again executions for 150 million Americans. We can see the murder rate drops exponentially with the execution rate. Again, at low execution rates, there is significant unexplained variation indicating other factors than the execution rate play a role when executions are rare or non existent. R**2, known as “R squared” is the coefficient of determination and is roughly the fraction of variation in the data explained by the model.
There appears to be a strong relationship between the execution rate and the number of murders — both the general murder rate and the serial killer murder rate. Both popular news and academic articles often claim mystification as to both the reasons for the sharp late 1960’s rise in murders compared to the historical 1950s, early 1960’s levels and similarly the dramatic drop in murders in the 1990s. It is true that the execution rate is probably highly correlated with other “tough on crime” measures over time.
Alternative Theories
Nonetheless, there are several prominent attempts to explain the sharp drop in murders in the 1990s without crediting any “tough on crime” policies, let alone the execution rate.
One attempt to explain the drop in the general murder rate in the 1990s is the removal of lead paint and piping in poor — often Black areas — and yet this would probably have been an even more serious problem in the 1950s and early 1960s when murder rates and serial murder rates were quite low. Most named serial killers are white, not Black. Contrary to old claims from the FBI, some serial killers are Black, but white serial killers still dominate the statistics. Yet serial killer murders declined as well in the 1990s as the execution rate climbed to the 1998 peak.
Here, for example, is a 2004 article by Steven D. Levitt ruling out increased use of capital punishment as the cause of the 1990s decline in murders. He claims:
“given the rarity of with which executions are carried out in this country and the long delays in doing so, a rational criminal should not be deterred by the threat of execution” (emphasis added)
This is a rather odd statement for a scientific data analysis where one ought to look at empirical data. Who said murderers are rational? Most serial killers are not rational as normally defined. They are often found legally sane which is a narrower concept than common notions of rationality. Indeed the historical data suggests relatively low levels of execution have deterred both highly irrational serial killers and presumably somewhat more rational ordinary murderers.
The Conspiracy Question
The stereotype of serial killers is that they are lone nuts. However the Wikipedia list of US serial killers actually lists at least 57 serial killers active between 1950 and 2020 with an accomplice or accomplices in the Notes section out of 553 active serial killers for a total of 89 killers including the accomplices. This is about 10.3% (57/553) to 16.09% (89/553) of the serial killers depending on how one counts accomplices. In common usage, the murders are the work of a conspiracy: two or more perpetrators.
The list appears to identify only accomplices convicted in court cases. For example, there was strong forensic and eyewitness evidence that Randy Kraft, one of the three seemingly independent California “Freeway Killers” of the 70s and 80s, had at least one accomplice. Police suspected one of his roommates but were unable to find enough evidence or secure a confession. The Wikipedia list does not mention any accomplices for Randy Kraft. Thus, the list probably understates the number of cases with actual accomplices.
It is true that many of these conspiracy cases are pairs such as the so-called “Toolbox Killers” Lawrence Bittaker and Roy Norris. Nonetheless, there are several cases of three or more “serial killers” working together. Another California “Freeway Killer,” William Bonin had an astonishing four accomplices — all convicted or confessed. The Briley Brothers were three brothers and an accomplice Duncan Eric Meekins — another total of four. Dean Corll has at least two accomplices, both convicted: Elmer Wayne Henley and David Brooks. The so-called “Ripper Crew,” a Satanic cult, in Chicago included at least four (4) convicted members: Robin Gecht, Andrew Kokoraleis, Thomas Kokoraleis, and Edward Spreitzer. Four people — Manuel Moore, Larry Green, Jessie Lee Cooks, and J. C. X. Simon — were convicted of the so-called Zebra Murders. That is five cases and twenty (20) out of 553 active identified serial killers between 1950 and 2020 with three or more clearly identified — convicted or confessed — conspirators, about one to four percent depending on how one counts the cases, accomplices and serial killers.
Only small serial murder conspiracies have been demonstrated in court or by rigorous forensic evidence. There is however a popular literature alleging some or a large fraction of serial killer cases are the work of a larger conspiracy or conspiracies such as Dave McGowan’s Programmed to Kill(no relation) and Maury Terry’s The Ultimate Evil.These works blame the serial murders on Satanic cults, neo-Nazis, elite pedophile networks and CIA MK-ULTRA-like mind control programs, often combined into a single super-conspiracy and often overlapping with the Satanic Ritual Abuse allegations of the 1980s — which in fact continue to the present.
The Late Dave McGowan, author of Programmed to Kill. (left)
It is more difficult to identify and convict murderers in larger conspiracies such as street gang violence, the “Mafia”, and other higher level organized crime. Many unsolved murders — often in inner city Black neighborhoods — are attributed to street gang violence. Larger conspiracies are more effective at intimidating witnesses and corrupting investigations than lone killers or pairs of killers. Larger conspiracies can be long lived and technically sophisticated, better at destroying forensic evidence, disposing of bodies etc. Proving a gang leader or organized crime official has ordered a murder can be difficult or impossible.
The serial killer super conspiracy theories invoke confessions by some serial killers such as the “Son of Sam” David Berkowitz claiming to have been part of a larger conspiracy and various anomalies in some serial killer cases, some quite odd and suspicious. For example, serial killer Bob Berdella, who owned Bob’s Bizarre Bazaar, a boutique that sold artifacts of the occult, home was purchased by Kansas City multi-millionaire Delbert Dunmire — a former bank robber— who eventually destroyed the home and presumably any remaining evidence.
Cary Stayner, convicted of killing four women around the Yosemite National Park in California, is the older brother of Stephen Stayner, a high profile victim of abduction by child molester Keith Parnell — the subject of national news stories and later a TV mini-series.
Police largely failed to investigate a series of disappearances of teenage boys, many from the same Junior High School, in Dean Corll’s neighborhood in Houston, Texas despite pleas from parents some of whom hired private investigators and posted flyers throughout the neighborhood — until the boys were found buried in Corll’s rented boathouse after accomplice Elmer Wayne Henley killed Corll and called the police.
It is unclear how to evaluate such anomalies. Serial killers are quite unusual. The cases frequently attract unusually high levels of publicity. The cases often overlap with prostitution and other illegal activities as well as legal but often socially taboo activities such as homosexuality or occult practices. In some cases, the police may be paid off to “look the other way” or even involved in these activities, which may explain some instances of remarkably inept policing.
Some of these theories emphasize the military background of some serial killers, suggesting they were specially trained or even brainwashed by MK-ULTRA like mind control programs during military service. Reviewing the fifty-seven (57) entries with identified accomplices active from 1950 to 2020 in the Wikipedia list — giving a total of 89 killers including the accomplices, only nine (9 or 15.8%) appear to have served in the US military: Doug Clark, Gary Lewingdon, John Allen Muhammad, Leonard Lake, Manuel Pardo, Roy Norris, and William Bonin. The five-thirty-eight statistics web site published an article in 2015 estimating that about 13.4% of US males have served in the US military.
Since most serial killers are men, there is little evidence that US military veterans are over- or under-represented among serial killers — at least who have identified accomplices. One might expect serial killers in a super conspiracy to be over-represented among serial killers with identified accomplices.
Relevant to the causation of the serial killer wave and the more recent mass shooting wave, some of these theories, notably Dave McGowan’s Programmed to Kill, argue the serial killer wave cases were manufactured in part to frighten the US public into embracing oppressive “tough on crime” policies that increase the power of the CIA, FBI, and other police and security agencies. Thus, there is no deterrent effect from executions but rather a wave of “false flag” operations to undercut more liberal policies such as reducing or eliminating use of the death penalty.
Conclusion
The Eighties serial killer wave was real, not wholly a product of media hype or manipulated statistics from the FBI Behavioral Sciences Unit or other official sources, despite both government and media exaggerations such as the Henry Lee Lucas case and the very high claimed numbers of Americans killed by serial killers during the early 1980s.
The major contributing factor to the wave was probably the dramatic drop in the execution rate and/or associated “tough on crime” measures in the mid 1960s.
The evidence for a super conspiracy behind the serial killer wave such as proposed by the late Dave McGowan in Programmed to Kill is quite weak but not non-existent. The anomalies cited in such theories probably can be explained by the unusual nature of the crimes and perpetrators, the extreme levels of publicity, unidentified accomplices — somewhat larger small conspiracies — which comprise 10-16% of the cases, and overlaps with illegal activities such as prostitution and police corruption.
A similar rise in murders — though not as great — only a factor of two — occurred in general US murders, generally less horrific and less likely to receive the death penalty than serial killers.
The significant variation in murder rates, both general US and serial killer, at lower execution rates indicates other factors come into play as well when executions are rare or do not occur.
We may be seeing a surge of mass shootings as the execution rate has declined since 1998 instead of the surge of serial killers in the 1960s and 1970s following the near cessation of executions culminating in a total cessation for four years after the 1972 Furman versus Georgia Supreme Court decision.
Note that these conclusions are not an endorsement of capital punishment, nor do they address a range of other issues regarding capital punishment such as wrongful convictions, racial and other discrimination in the application of capital punishment, and the relative effectiveness of life imprisonment without possibility of parole.
(C) 2022 by John F. McGowan, Ph.D.
About Me
John F. McGowan, Ph.D. solves problems using mathematics and mathematical software, including developing gesture recognition for touch devices, video compression and speech recognition technologies. He has extensive experience developing software in C, C++, MATLAB, Python, Visual Basic and many other programming languages. He has been a Visiting Scholar at HP Labs developing computer vision algorithms and software for mobile devices. He has worked as a contractor at NASA Ames Research Center involved in the research and development of image and video processing algorithms and technology. He has published articles on the origin and evolution of life, the exploration of Mars (anticipating the discovery of methane on Mars), and cheap access to space. He has a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a B.S. in physics from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech).
Subscribe to our free Weekly Newsletter for articles and videos on practical mathematics, Internet Censorship, ways to fight back against censorship, and other topics by sending an email to: subscribe [at] mathematical-software.com
The Gray Lady Winked: How the New York Times’s Misreporting, Distortions, and Fabrications Radically Alter History by Ashley Rindsberg, Mark Crispin Miller (Foreword)
First Edition 283 pages, including Notes and Bibliography (no Index)
My Rating: 3/5
The New York Times is arguably the most influential newspaper in the world. Its’ uncritical repetition of government and Democratic Party propaganda regarding the COVID-19 pandemic and lockdowns has drawn critical attention to its news reporting as never before in US history. Ironically, former Times reporter Alex Berenson has become a leading critic of the government’s often changing COVID and lockdown claims as well as the Times dubious reporting.
The Gray Lady Winked attempts to be a comprehensive expose of controversial and clearly inaccurate, even fraudulent news reporting by the paper dating back to its coverage of the Nazis and Stalinist Russia in the early 20th century. Although the New York Times has long been criticized by many, this appears to be the first attempt to cover the controversies and scandals in a single book — an audacious and difficult undertaking given the scope of the New York Times news reporting.
The Gray Lady Winked is a short book with ten chapters, each covering a controversial news story: the Nazis, the Ukraine famine under Stalin, the Times muted coverage of the Holocaust despite or perhaps because it was a Jewish newspaper, Herbert Matthews glowing coverage of Fidel Castro, David Halberstam and Neil Sheehan’s questionable reporting from Vietnam, the early coverup of radiation sickness in Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the US government and the Times working hand in hand, the controversy over the death of Muhammad al-Durrah — a ten year old Palestinian boy shot during the early days of the Second Intifada in 2000, the Times questionable and inaccurate reporting after September 11 and on the elusive Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD), questionable reporting on an alleged epidemic of violence by veterans of the Iraq II and Afghan wars, and finally the super-controversial 1619 Project with its dubious claims the American Revolution was fought to preserve slavery.
Each of these chapters covers a complex topic that could be and in many cases has been covered by entire lengthy books, some of which are used as references. The Gray Lady Winked skips other scandals and controversies such as the infamous Kitty Genovese murder Times reporting which falsely portrayed an entire neighborhood — thirty-eight people — watching a young woman raped and murdered from their apartment windows without calling the police and the controversies over Raymond Bonner’s reporting on El Salvador in the early 1980s.
Article Debunking Times Reporting on Kitty Genovese Murder
I felt the book’s driving agenda and goal is to criticize and discredit the Times reporting on Israel, specifically the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, where the heavily Jewish Times is accused of a pro-Palestinian bias if not a sinister agenda. In particular, coverage of the death of Muhammad al-Durrah and the Second Intifada by then Times Jerusalem Bureau Chief Deborah Sontag and her husband Walter Orme come in for heavy criticism.
Ashley Rindsberg lives in Israel with his family according to the book and presumably is an Israeli citizen. To this end, the book collects many historical episodes of questionable or false reporting by the Times to discredit its coverage of Israel: see they have done it to many others and could do it to you too dear reader.
I found some of the arguments emotional and unconvincing, notably in the chapter The White Taffetta Gown: “People Who Happen to be Jewish” which covers the Times muted response to the Holocaust. The phrase “white taffetta gown” is drawn from glowing Times coverage of the marriage of publisher Arthur Hays Sulzberger’s daughter Marian to Orvil Dryfoos on July 8, 1941 even as the Nazis were massacring Jews in Ponary, Poland.
The Nazis and the Holocaust are a touchy and emotional topic, especially for Jews. It is usually difficult to challenge arguments that invoke the Holocaust.
The chapter argues that anti-semitism was rife in the US and in heavily Jewish New York City in 1941. Rindsberg seems to blame the Times downplaying of the Jewish origin of the Sulzberger family and many, many Times reporters both on fear of anti-semitism and on the “assimilationist” views specific to German Reform or Conservative Jews such as the Sulzberger family. The book seems to argue that the Times should have loudly announced their Jewishness, lead the charge to publicize the Holocaust — with no certainty this would save a single life and no fear of losing the Times vast influence in the US and the world in the face of the alleged pervasive, deep rooted anti-semitism in the US.
There are a number of problems with these arguments. Many Jews, not just German Reform/Conservative Jews like the Sulzbergers, downplayed or disguised their Jewish origins at the time. Many of these Jews — in Hollywood for example — were Eastern European, Polish, Lithuanian, Latvian, Ukrainian, etc. in origin and not German.
NBC Holocaust Mini Series from 1978
Indeed the Holocaust did not become a pop-culture phenomenon in the US until the 1970s. Although the Nazis were almost always portrayed as monsters, heavily Jewish Hollywood largely steered clear of the Holocaust and specifically Jewish issues in movies and television prior to the 1970s, portraying the Nazis as an insane threat to everyone which was the US government line during World War II.
For example, the IMDB list “The 50 Most Moving Holocaust Films” lists only seven (7) movies before 1970 with only three (3) from the United States (Hollywood): The Diary of Anne Frank (1959), The Pawnbroker (1964), and Judgment at Nuremberg (1961). The floodgates opened in the late 1970s with the NBC Holocaust TV miniseries (April 16-April 19, 1978) with an estimated 120 million viewers, as well as other videos and books such as Ira Levin’s techno-horror Joseph Mengele book and movie The Boys from Brazil.
Outside of big cities such as New York most Americans had probably never even encountered a Jew (“Rindsberg”) or “a Person Who Happens to Be Jewish” (“Times Assimilationist”) — might well have thought them to be ancient history or a myth found only in the Bible. It is not clear how most Americans in 1941 would have responded to a loudly, militantly Jewish Hollywood or New York Times.
How rife was antisemitism in the US, let alone heavily Jewish New York City in 1941? One of the remarkable aspects of the 1920s and 1930s was how many Jews, either immigrants or the children of immigrants mostly from Eastern Europe, were somehow admitted to the top Ivy League universities such as Harvard, Yale, and Princeton during this period. The Jewish Virtual Library for example claims that twenty-one percent (21%) of Harvard’s 1922 freshman class were Jewish. https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/harvard-s-jewish-problem
Percentage of Jews at Harvard in 1922 according to Jewish Virtual Library (Screenshot August 15, 2022)
According to the Jewish Virtual Library, there were 3.3 to 3.6 million Jews in the United States in 1920.
Jewish Population of United States in 1920 (Jewish Virtual Library Screenshot August 15, 2022)
According to the 1920 US Census, the total US population was 105 million (117 million with outlying possessions).
Jews constituted about 3.4% of the US population in 1922, but 21% of the freshman class at Harvard, the premier educational institution of the ruling elite from which eight US Presidents have earned degrees: John Adams, John Quincy Adams, Rutherford B Hayes, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, George W Bush, and Barack Obama.
This heavy representation of the tiny US Jewish minority predates the reforms that created the SAT tests to recruit some mostly middle class students from across the country and more diverse backgrounds. Readers may have heard of the quotas to limit the fraction of Jews in Ivy League schools at the time, but as with the 15-20% Asian quota practiced by these schools today, these quotas were much larger than the percent of Jews in the general US population then or now.
Jewish sources usually credit the unusually high representation of Jews, a tiny minority, in Ivy League colleges such as Harvard during the 1920s and later to “merit,” but…
The Ivy League schools at this time were far from the modern ideal of competitive, meritocratic higher education. They derived most of their students — with the apparent exception of Jews — from elite prep schools often modeled on the English “public schools” such as Eton and Harrow that prepared students for Oxford and Cambridge. This was the heyday of Anglo-American (WASP) elitism. This meant the entire graduating class from elite prep schools such as Philips Exeter, Philips Andover (George H.W. Bush and George W Bush’s alma mater), Groton (FDR’s alma mater), and others, would go to one of the Ivy League schools. These were nearly all the children of wealthy, often politically connected white Anglo-Saxon Protestants.
Other groups such as Irish Catholics had great difficulty getting into these top schools. Joseph Kennedy, the President’s father, was able to get into Harvard, but this was almost certainly because his father was the boss of the Democratic machine in Boston and Harvard had to keep the city government happy. One could go on in this vein for some time. Rife with anti-semitism?
The Gray Lady Winked is useful as an attempt, probably the first attempt to give a comprehensive account of the history of questionable and indeed clearly false reporting in some cases on major consequential news stories and events by the Times. This is a huge subject and the chapters are often too short to adequately cover the complexities of the stories. The Jewish “inside baseball” and pro-Israeli bias detract from some parts of the book. A second edition might address some of these issues. At present it may be the best treatment of the New York Times history of errors and controversies.
(C) 2022 by John F. McGowan, Ph.D.
About Me
John F. McGowan, Ph.D. solves problems using mathematics and mathematical software, including developing gesture recognition for touch devices, video compression and speech recognition technologies. He has extensive experience developing software in C, C++, MATLAB, Python, Visual Basic and many other programming languages. He has been a Visiting Scholar at HP Labs developing computer vision algorithms and software for mobile devices. He has worked as a contractor at NASA Ames Research Center involved in the research and development of image and video processing algorithms and technology. He has published articles on the origin and evolution of life, the exploration of Mars (anticipating the discovery of methane on Mars), and cheap access to space. He has a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a B.S. in physics from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech).
Short twelve minute video on whether the CIA used the tiny Franklin Federal Credit Union in Omaha, Nebraska in the 1980s as cover for a sexual blackmail operation that ensnared top officials in the Reagan and Bush I administrations.
Subscribe to our free Weekly Newsletter for articles and videos on practical mathematics, Internet Censorship, ways to fight back against censorship, and other topics by sending an email to: subscribe [at] mathematical-software.com
John F. McGowan, Ph.D. solves problems using mathematics and mathematical software, including developing gesture recognition for touch devices, video compression and speech recognition technologies. He has extensive experience developing software in C, C++, MATLAB, Python, Visual Basic and many other programming languages. He has been a Visiting Scholar at HP Labs developing computer vision algorithms and software for mobile devices. He has worked as a contractor at NASA Ames Research Center involved in the research and development of image and video processing algorithms and technology. He has published articles on the origin and evolution of life, the exploration of Mars (anticipating the discovery of methane on Mars), and cheap access to space. He has a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a B.S. in physics from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech).
Did the CIA collect sexual blackmail information on the Reagan and Bush administrations in the 1980s, secretly controlling the country? Is the CIA continuing to do this today with front men such as the late financier Jeffrey Epstein? Was the Franklin Scandal the tip of a Satanic iceberg that continues today or the crazed QAnon of the 80s or both?
The Franklin Scandal: A Story of Powerbrokers, Child Abuse & Betrayal
On November 4, 1988, the National Credit Union Association (NCUA) and the FBI shut down the Franklin Community Federal Credit Union in Omaha, Nebraska, quickly determining that about $40 million had been embezzled from the credit union. The investigators indicted the credit union manager Lawrence “Larry” E. King, a gay African-American Omaha native, Republican activist, and gifted singer who performed the National Anthem at the 1984 Republican Convention. Amongst other things, King claimed to be a friend of President George H.W. Bush (Bush I), showing off a picture of Bush with him. King was eventually convicted of embezzling the missing money and other financial crimes.
Against the backdrop of the massive Savings and Loan (S&L) and junk bond scandals of the late 1980s, ultimately costing taxpayers about $200 billion, the missing $40 million was a drop in the bucket. But allegations of pedophilia, prostitution, pandering of underage boys and girls to powerful business and political figures and even Satanic ritual abuse by Larry King and his associates had been accumulating for years in the Nebraska foster care system where King’s cousin and her family “adopted” several foster children who reported substantial abuse to the authorities.
The Nebraska State Senate established a committee, “the Franklin Committee,” to investigate both the financial scandal and the allegations of sex crimes. The committee hired a private investigator Gary Caradori who managed to find at least four additional alleged victims with similar stories: Alisha Owen, Troy Boner, Danny King and Paul Bonacci. The federal government, state of Nebraska, and Douglas County (Omaha) empaneled three separate grand juries to investigate.
The grand juries, the FBI, and the Nebraska State Patrol (NSP) soon focused on an alleged conspiracy by Gary Caradori and the alleged victims to get a lucrative book or movie deal and/or lawsuit settlements by accusing numerous powerful figures in Nebraska of sex crimes including Omaha Police Department (OPD) Chief Robert Wadman, Omaha World-Herald (the largest paper in Omaha) publisher Harold Andersen, department store heir and millionaire Alan Baer, and a number of others.
At least according to his family, friends, and colleagues, Caradori flew to Chicago with his eight year old son AJ, ostensibly to attend a baseball game, to acquire actual blackmail photos or video from Rusty Nelson, the alleged blackmail photographer of King’s sex and blackmail ring. Caradori’s plane disintegrated or blew up mysteriously on the way back to Omaha, killing Caradori and his son. No blackmail photos or videos were recovered from the wreckage according to official reports.
Acting on the grand jury report, the Nebraska authorities successfully convicted Alisha Owen of perjury. At least two of the victim-witnesses, Troy Boner and Danny King, recanted their stories under interrogation and testified against Owen, claiming Caradori had conspired with them to make up the original stories in search of movie deals and legal settlements.
The Franklin Committee was shut down. John W. DeCamp, a former Nebraska state senator involved in the investigation, wrote a book The Franklin Cover-up: Child Abuse, Satanism, and Murder in Nebraska alleging a massive cover-up. DeCamp linked the scandal to the CIA, the Iran-Contra scandal, and Satanism. Theories about the scandal proliferated on the Internet.
Nick Bryant’s The Franklin Scandal
Nick Bryant’s The Franklin Scandal: A Story of Powerbrokers, Child Abuse, and Betrayal devotes 629 pages to the scandal, focusing on the alleged victims with a hefty 154 page chapter “State vs Owen” on Alisha Owen and her perjury trial. Bryant traveled to Nebraska many times over several years, interviewing and befriending many of the alleged victims and tracking down several additional alleged victims starting from a lengthy list of possible victims compiled by Gary Caradori before his death.
This is a very long book with extensive information on some aspects of the scandal, especially the alleged victims and their stories. There are several sections with fairly explicitly discussions alleged sado-masochistic encounters and sex parties that may be difficult for some readers.
The book is organized in a loosely chronological order, but jumps around disconcertingly between chapters and sometimes sections. For example the chapter on Gary Caradori includes Caradori’s death and the end of the Franklin Committee (state senate). The subsequent extremely long “State vs Owen” chapter jumps back to the grand jury investigations when Caradori was still alive, following Alisha Owen instead of Caradori.
I came away from reading the book feeling that some of the claims were probably true. There was a cover-up and Gary Caradori was probably murdered.
That said, there is clearly reasonable doubt, indeed more than reasonable doubt. There are no pictures or video, DNA test results, or other solid forensic evidence supporting the allegations. The book opens with a wild goose chase with alleged blackmail photographer Rusty Nelson that never produced any pictures, film, or video that Nelson claimed he had stashed in remote locations in Colorado.
The alleged witnesses — mostly victims — all have significant credibility issues: criminal records, psychological problems, drug use, confessed involvement in highly illegal activities, and changing and contradictory stories. This is particularly true of Paul Bonacci who has reported some of the most bizarre experiences including Satanic ritual abuse claims and was diagnosed with Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD) — now known as Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) and Rusty Nelson, the alleged blackmail photographer whom Bryant has caught lying to him repeatedly according to the book.
The book actually provides very limited information on the named alleged perpetrators other than Larry King: millionaire department store heir Alan Baer, Omaha World-Herald publisher Harold Andersen, backroom Nebraska political figure Eugene Mahoney, Omaha Police Chief Robert Wadman, and others. This may be to avoid libel lawsuits, but one would expect these people to have other skeletons in their closets if the Franklin allegations are true, a form of partial corroboration of the allegations. One person named by the witnesses, Omaha World-Herald reporter Peter Citron, was convicted of child molestation independent of the Franklin investigation for example.
Columnist gets prison terms for child sexual assaults
by Jon Sweet UPI, July 23, 1990
OMAHA — A former newspaper columnist and television entertainment critic was sentenced in court Monday to prison for a term of three to eight years for sexually molesting two young boys in his home.
Peter Citron, who pleaded no contest to two felony counts of sexually assaulting a minor, was also declared a mentally disordered sex offender and ordered to undergo treatment during his prison term.
(….)
In his interviews promoting the book, Nick Bryant complains about the unwillingness of editors at mainstream book publishers and magazines to publish the book or his articles on the scandal (TrineDay specializes in “conspiracy” and other “fringe” topics), attributing this resistance to “cognitive dissonance,” perhaps hinting at a larger super-conspiracy preventing publication as well. The book suggests that Larry King was working with DC lobbyist Craig Spence in a larger CIA backed sex and blackmail ring providing underage boys to top officials in the George H.W. Bush administration, perhaps even including Bush I himself. However, given the absence of solid forensic evidence such as photos, film, DNA etc., it is easy to see why most editors considering both their reputation and the possibility of lawsuits from powerful, wealthy persons would pass on the story.
“Conspiracy Theory” versus “Conspiracy Theory”
The phrase “conspiracy theory” is frequently used to dismiss allegations of crime, misconduct, and even just gross incompetence by groups of powerful people, especially authority figures in the worldview of the person or persons shouting “conspiracy theory”– without mentioning or addressing the specific facts or logic of the conspiracy theory.
Thus, recently for example, suggestions that US government officials erred in funding dangerous gain of function research into bat coronaviruses as the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) over the objections of hundreds of prominent scientists questioning the “gain of function” research during the Obama administration and lo and behold the enhanced coronavirus might have escaped from WIV some time in late 2019 were immediately dismissed as a “conspiracy theory” in February of 2020 in what was clearly a coordinated media campaign organized in part by Peter Daszak, head of the EcoHealth Alliance which acted as the conduit for government funding of the “gain of function” research at WIV.
With conspiracy theories about larger conspiracies, it is often said “someone would have talked” as if no one has talked. In fact, as with the Franklin Scandal it is common to find multiple people talked in many alleged conspiracies. This was noticeable with many of the multiple victim child molestation cases of the 1980s, some of which such as the McMartin Preschool case featured many alleged victims.
In these “several people talked” cases, the multiple witnesses can be explained away by alleging a conspiracy to fabricate a conspiracy, generally orchestrated consciously or not by the investigators, in this case Gary Caradori. Cases like the McMartin Preschool case were explained away by blaming leading questioning by the therapists who interviewed the children, false memory syndrome, and similar excuses.
Those trying to discredit the “conspiracy theory” generally try to avoid or minimize the use of the word conspiracy in describing their own conspiracy theories as this may raise questions in the minds of listeners indoctrinated to believe conspiracies by their beloved authority figures are impossible. In the Franklin case, the authorities used the phrase “a Carefully Crafted Hoax” to describe the conspiracy allegedly organized by Gary Caradori.
Once you have voted for Bill Clinton it is hard to accept that he would sexually harass subordinates or that his wife and staff would conspire to cover up such misconduct. However, “a vast right-wing conspiracy” to fabricate the many scandals that have dogged the Clintons seems entirely reasonable and likely.
Prior to Monica Lewinsky, several women had alleged that Bill Clinton had sexually harassed or even raped them. Unlike the Franklin case, Monica Lewinsky with some coaching by Linda Tripp retained forensic DNA evidence of her relationship with Clinton. Linda Tripp was even taping her phone conversations with Lewinsky. A certain resemblance to the alleged Franklin sexual blackmail scheme is evident in Clinton’s misadventures.
The CIA and Satanism
Nick Bryant argues unequivocally in online interviews and to some extent in the book that Larry King and Craig Spence were CIA “assets” recruited in South East Asia during the Vietnam war. King served in the US military in Thailand during the war. Spence worked for ABC News in Vietnam at about the same time. A few of the witnesses such as Paul Bonacci and Rusty Nelson alleged a CIA involvement in the alleged sex and blackmail scheme.
King supposedly recruited underage boys and sometimes girls from the famous Boys Town Catholic orphanage in Omaha and other local sources and flew them to Washington DC and other cities to service the rich and powerful, notably unidentified officials in the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations. Lobbyist Craig Spence held parties for the DC elite during this period, allegedly attended by CIA Director William Casey for example.
Some of the stories — e.g. Paul Bonacci — included Satanic elements, alleged human sacrifice, the CIA MK-Ultra mind control program, and other far out elements. Bryant minimizes discussion of the alleged Satanic elements even though he traces his investigation back to an assignment to write a “very dark” article on Satanism. Only a few paragraphs here and there deal with the Satanism aspect or Bonacci’s more far out stories.
Curiously enough the only clear CIA involvement in the Franklin Scandal in the book is that the Franklin Committee (yes!) hired former CIA Director (1973-1976) William Colby to investigate the death of Gary Caradori. Colby was a friend of John DeCamp. DeCamp had served with (or for) Colby in Vietnam where Colby was head of the controversial Phoenix Program, an alleged assassination program to wipe out the VietCong in South Vietnam accused of numerous crimes.
William Colby (CIA Director, 1973-1976)
Thus the Franklin Scandal involved CIA connected investigators accusing other business and political figures in Nebraska of working for/with the CIA in a nefarious sex and blackmail scheme. As the saying goes, you can’t make this stuff up.
List of CIA References in The Franklin Scandal
Although CIA involvement is central to Nick Bryant’s theory of the Franklin Scandal, the six-hundred plus page book actually only refers to the CIA in about twenty two short sections — often a sentence or paragraph. The most substantive references — claims of CIA involvement by Craig Spence, Henry Vinson, and Washington Times reporter Paul Rodriguez — are contained in the short thirty-six page chapter “Washington DC”,” pp. 275-310. Nick Bryant has another book Confessions of a DC Madam co-written with Henry Vinson, detailing Vinson’s claims.
Neither Spence, a cocaine addict who officially committed suicide, nor Henry Vinson, a now convicted felon who ran the escort service that provided young male prostitutes to Spence seem particularly reliable sources.
Again, remarkably, the only clearly documented CIA connections in the Franklin Scandal book are between the Franklin Committee and former CIA Director William Colby (see below).
p 9, “The Net was replete with stories of Satanists abducting children, and also of clandestine bonds between Satanists and the CIA.”
p 10-15, discuses the “Finders” case in which the CIA allegedly quashed an investigation into alleged severe child abuse by the “Finders” group, a controversial cult-like self-help group, in 1987. The book does not demonstrate a connection between the Finders case and the Franklin Scandal as far as I can tell.
p 17, quotes Larry King from 1988 issue of Omaha’s weekly Metropolitan claiming to know and admire the late Bill Casey, CIA Director in the Reagan Administration. (claim by Larry King who was convicted of embezzling about $40 million from the Franklin credit union)
p 18, “Though [John W DeCamp’s] Franklin Cover-up offered compelling evidence for the existence of [Larry] King’s pedophile ring and its cover-up by law enforcement, it lacked substantive proof for the ring’s connection to Washington DC, blackmail, and the CIA, and also the pandering of Boys Town kids.”
p 81, “The [Franklin] Committee members kicked around a number of names for a week or so, and at the suggestion of [Chairman Loran] Schmit they voted to invite former CIA Director William Colby to apply for chief counsel.”
“Since the credit union’s demise, several rumors were wafting around Lincoln and Omaha that Franklin monies had been covertly diverted to the CIA in its efforts to support the Nicaraguan Contras’ fight against the Communist Sandinistas.” (rumors)
p 82, “[Schmit’s] fellow Committee members shot down Colby’s appointment by a narrow margin — four to three.”
p 168-169, “[alleged blackmail photographer Rusty Nelson] didn’t feel compelled to convince me of the implausible events he discussed, which included allegations of pedophile politicians at the pinnacle of national power, Larry King’s CIA connections, blackmail, and the auctioning of children.” (Bryant describes Rusty Nelson as an untrustworthy character, having caught Nelson lying to him on several occasions.)
p 177-179, discussed Franklin Committee hiring former CIA Director William Colby to investigate Gary Caradori’s death and Colby’s own suspicious death in 1996 (officially an accident). Note hiring Colby is the only unequivocal, documented tie between the Franklin Scandal and the CIA. (documented CIA connection)
p 214, “[Boys Town counselor Dr. Leslie Collins] even held his elder stepdaughter at knifepoint for hours when she attempted to break off their [sexual] ‘relationship.’ Collins also threatened to kill her boyfriend if she ended her ‘relationship’ with Collins — she took his threats very seriously; he had previously disclosed [claimed] to her that he carried out covert activities for the CIA. Collins would ultimately be sentenced to thirty-to-fifty years for the sexual assaults on his stepdaughters.” (claim by a convicted felon trying to intimidate his victim, see references at end for Leslie Collins)
p 253, Discusses a rambling monologue by a witness called by special prosecutor Van Pelt for the Douglas County grand jury including the sentence: “Now, so I believe that Communism is a simplex theory, which has no practical application in reality, and Communists are lacking in judgment, and also that both the CIA and the three FDA networks are manipulated by double agents of the KGB.”
p 279, In discussing documentation from Henry Vinson’s gay male escort service acquired by Washington Times reporter Paul Rodriguez: “[Craig] Spence had ties to the CIA, blackmail and Larry King.” Apparently citing a New York Times article: “In fact, CIA Director William Casey seemed to be particularly fond of [Craig] Spence and his high flying get-togethers.”
p 282, “In some Japanese political circles, it was thought that the CIA had hatched the story [alleged leak of classified F-16 data to Soviets] to discredit [Japanese politician and Craig Spence associate Motoo] Shiina and nullify his rise to power.” (informed speculation)
p 287, “[Craig] Spence would divulge to Washington Times [owned by Rev. Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church!] reporters that ‘friendly’ intelligence agents bugged all the parties at his Kalorama home, and he repeatedly alluded to the fact that he was in the CIA. ‘We had sources disclose that Spence wasn’t a direct employee of the CIA, but they confirmed Spence was a CIA asset,’ [Washington Times report Paul] Rodriguez told me [Nick Bryant]” (undisclosed sources)
p 290, “After [Craig] Spence threatened the [Washington Times] reporters with the razor blade, he launched into a protracted diatribe of self-importance, asserting he had carried out assignments for the CIA on numerous occasions — assignments that were crucial to covert actions in Vietnam, Japan, Central America, and the Middle East.” (Threatening reporters with a razor blade obviously raises questions about Spence’s sanity.)
p. 291, Discussing Craig Spence’s apparent suicide a few months later: “Next to Spence’s body on the bed was one final enigma: a newspaper clipping about then CIA Director William Webster’s attempts to protect CIA agents summoned to testify before government bodies — the Washington Times reported that Spence had indeed been subpoenaed by a grand jury investigating [Henry Vinson’s] the 34th Place escort service.
p. 293, “I [Nick Bryant] asked [Henry] Vinson two questions: ‘Were [Craig] Spence and [Larry] King partners in pedophilic pandering?’ and ‘Were [Craig] Spence and [Larry] King hooked up with the CIA?’ He reponded with an unhesitant, nonchalant ‘Yes’ to both questions.”
p. 296, 297 Vinson discusses his alleged dealings with Spence, King, and purported CIA “agents” or “assets”. (Vinson is a convicted felon.)
p 306, Strange story of an unidentified police officer source’s encounter with “suits” — “CIA, FBI or Secret Service” and Larry King during an investigation. (unnamed source, no mention of suits showing official ID to the unnamed police officer)
p 468, “However, [Washington Times reporter] Paul Rodriguez and his colleagues had [unnamed] sources state that Craig Spence was a CIA asset; Spence himself claimed he was a CIA asset and confessed that his home was bugged by “friendly” intelligence agents. Henry Vinson also told me [Nick Bryant] that Spence confessed to him he was a CIA asset and that his blackmail enterprise was CIA-affiliated.”
“Vinson claims to have informed federal officials that the pedophilic blackmail enterprise of King and Spence had connections to the CIA. The CIA has denied its affiliation to Spence, and Vinson is a convicted felon, …” (emphasis added)
p 469, Discusses CIA’s Operation Midnight Climax, part of the MK-ULTRA mind control experiments, suggesting parallels to the alleged King/Spence sexual blackmail operation.
p 473, returns to CIA and Finders case briefly.
p 499, Document Index, Documents — CIA inducing dissociation and MPD (Multiple Personality Disorder) p. 593
What Would Make the Franklin Scandal Book Better?
I found the semi-chronological order disconcerting, especially jumping back to before Gary Caradori’s death. Death after all is a final, emotional event, and suddenly realizing Caradori was back alive again several pages later confused me.
I would have preferred a strictly chronological order, perhaps with an overview of events at the very beginning. The wild goose chase with Rusty Nelson in which Bryant and Nelson were pulled over by menacing Nebraska State Patrol officers and their vehicle searched is discussed at the start of the book, perhaps as a mechanism to grab the reader’s interest and attention. This might be an effective opening hook, but then give a clearer timeline of events the book will cover and then move to a strictly chronological retelling of events. Any documentation or pictures of the search would have helped make the case for a cover-up.
Give a few paragraph to a few page introduction to each key character, especially the named perpetrators as soon as they first appear. Alan Baer’s name appears many times before the book finally explains who he is in detail. According to the index, Baer is first mentioned on page 114, as follows:
“Alan Baer, a prominent Omaha millionaire whom Caradori would link to King’s pandering network.”
Baer is then mentioned briefly six more times with little further info until pages 162-163 finally explain who Baer is and his relationship to the Brandeis department store family. He inherited the Brandeis fortune from his mother’s brother E. John Brandeis. As far as I can tell, Bryant never bothers to tell us whether the Omaha Brandeis family is related to the famous Supreme Court justice Louis D. Brandeis in some way. The Brandeis family members are not listed in the index either. This limited information on Baer is part of a general dearth of information on the alleged named perpetrators.
The chapter “State vs Owen” is very long, 154 pages, longer than some books. It consisted mostly of an almost blow by blow, line by line recounting from the grand jury and perjury trial transcripts with editorial comments added. A shorter chapter summarizing the events and issues of the trial with the actual transcripts in the already 100 page appendix with supporting documents would be easier to digest.
The Franklin Scandal was quite complex with numerous players and events. Several tables of key people, events, and data would likely help. Specifically:
All Legal Charges, Convictions or Case Resolutions — who was actually charged and convicted of what. All in one place.
All Named Alleged Perpetrators, what they allegedly did, any convictions, and any other convictions or scandals that might speak to their character.
All Named Witnesses with any credibility issues such as criminal convictions, changed stories, drug use, etc. listed.
All Suspicious Deaths (there were several suspicious deaths in addition to Gary Caradori and his son), Official Cause of Death, Name, Date, suspicious circumstances.
Key Documented Financial Transactions, such as millionaire department store heir Alan Baer’s alleged payment of $12,000 to either Franklin Credit Union or Larry King personally. Documented financial transactions are frequently more persuasive than eyewitness testimony in “conspiracy theory” cases. Witnesses after all may be lying, mistaken, or even insane — all three are usually alleged in “conspiracy theory” cases as in the Franklin Scandal. Put copies of the checks in the appendix with the other supporting documents.
Conclusion
In the Franklin case, we have several witnesses with similar corroborating original stories, witnesses with significant credibility issues including recanting under interrogation, witnesses from multiple sources — social workers in the Nebraska foster care system and Gary Caradori who seemingly tried to corroborate the original foster care stories as a good investigator should, and now several more found by Nick Bryant. We have two competing conspiracy theories to explain the testimony and no solid forensic evidence — no pictures, video, or DNA. At this late date we are unlikely to get to “ground truth” even with a thorough, sincere, fair, competent re-investigation.
The bigger lesson is that — as in many “conspiracy theory” cases — often some people do talk, sometimes many, telling similar tales. Eyewitness testimony proves of little persuasive value in many cases. Eyewitnesses tend to be either participants in the conspiracy such as Henry Vinson and Rusty Nelson who inherently have a credibility issue or accidental observers who cannot explain in detail their odd experiences and whose credibility may be undercut by their attempts to explain their puzzling observations.
The many people who claim to have been involved in Satanic cults including ritual abuse and even human sacrifice in recent decades may persuade credulous evangelical Christians and miscellaneous others but have been largely dismissed by society at large even in cases with demonstrable bodies and other evidence of reality.
Multiple mutually supporting accounts can frequently be blamed on conscious or unconscious conspiracies by the investigators as with the Franklin Credit Union scandal and Gary Caradori: overzealous prosecutors, a vast right wing (or left wing) conspiracy, psychotherapists with leading questions, false memory syndrome, and other excuses. Often canceled checks for large unexplained amounts of money have been the most persuasive evidence of actual conspiracy in practice.
John F. McGowan, Ph.D. solves problems using mathematics and mathematical software, including developing gesture recognition for touch devices, video compression and speech recognition technologies. He has extensive experience developing software in C, C++, MATLAB, Python, Visual Basic and many other programming languages. He has been a Visiting Scholar at HP Labs developing computer vision algorithms and software for mobile devices. He has worked as a contractor at NASA Ames Research Center involved in the research and development of image and video processing algorithms and technology. He has published articles on the origin and evolution of life, the exploration of Mars (anticipating the discovery of methane on Mars), and cheap access to space. He has a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a B.S. in physics from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech).
Short video review of Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon by Dave McGowan (no relation) arguing against his startling thesis that the Laurel Canyon folk rock music “revolution” of the late 1960’s was engineered by the military industrial complex to discredit the anti-Vietnam war movement by associating it with oddly dressed, drug addled hippies.
Subscribe to our free Weekly Newsletter for articles and videos on practical mathematics, Internet Censorship, ways to fight back against censorship, and other topics by sending an email to: subscribe [at] mathematical-software.com
John F. McGowan, Ph.D. solves problems using mathematics and mathematical software, including developing gesture recognition for touch devices, video compression and speech recognition technologies. He has extensive experience developing software in C, C++, MATLAB, Python, Visual Basic and many other programming languages. He has been a Visiting Scholar at HP Labs developing computer vision algorithms and software for mobile devices. He has worked as a contractor at NASA Ames Research Center involved in the research and development of image and video processing algorithms and technology. He has published articles on the origin and evolution of life, the exploration of Mars (anticipating the discovery of methane on Mars), and cheap access to space. He has a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a B.S. in physics from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech).
Laurel Canyon, Covert Ops & The Dark Heart of the Hippie Dream
David McGowan (with a foreword by Nick Bryant)
Headpress, April 30, 2014, 316 pages (Paperback), also has Kindle version
This book addresses the question whether and to what extent powerful interests such as the “military industrial complex” influence or even fully create popular culture and the “news” convincing us to buy goods and services, support public policies or do things that are not in our interest and even quite harmful.
Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon argues that the hippie counterculture of the 1960’s largely grew out of the folk rock “revolution” music scene in Laurel Canyon in Southern California epitomized by the Byrds, Jim Morrison, and other counterculture icons of the era who lived in and around Laurel Canyon — not Haight Ashbury in San Francisco. Not only that but the Laurel Canyon music scene was a carefully staged psychological operation by “military intelligence” and the CIA to discredit the anti-Vietnam war movement by associating it with long haired, oddly dressed, drug addicted hippies.
Jim Morrison, Military Intelligence Operative?
The poster child for this theory is Jim Morrison of the Doors, surprisingly the son of Rear Admiral George Stephen Morrison who commanded the US fleet in the infamous and controversial Gulf of Tonkin incidents in August of 1964 which provided the pretext for a massive increase in the US involvement in Vietnam — flooding the small south-east Asian nation with US troops in 1965. Yes, Jim Morrison really was the son of Admiral Morrison. A number of other key figures in the folk rock revolution/Laurel Canyon music scene were sons of career military officers including John Philips of the Mamas and Papas, Frank Zappa, Gram Parsons of the Byrds, and Stephen Stills of Buffalo Springfield.
Dave McGowan (1960-2015) Discussing Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon in 2014
David McGowan (1960-2015, no relation) presents the birth of the 1965 folk rock revolution as follows:
All these folks gathered nearly simultaneously along the narrow, winding roads of Laurel Canyon. They came from across the country— although the Washington, DC area was noticeably over-represented— as well as from Canada and England, and, in at least one case, all the way from Nazi Germany. They came even though, at the time, there was no music industry in Los Angeles. They came even though, at the time, there was no live music scene to speak of. They came even though, in retrospect, there was no discernible reason for them to do so.
McGowan, David. Weird Scenes Inside The Canyon: Laurel Canyon, Covert Ops & The Dark Heart Of The Hippie Dream (p. 17). Headpress. Kindle Edition.
David McGowan returns to this theme several times in the book and in most of the many interviews he did on the book, many available on YouTube as of July 9, 2022. This thesis is demonstrably false.
There was a sizable music industry in Los Angeles in the 1958 to 1965 period including the Southern California icon Capitol Records founded in 1942. Capitol Records was the label for the Kingston Trio who launched the “folk music revival” in 1958 with their hit “Tom Dooley.” The author mentions Capitol at least three times in the book! Other LA area record labels included: Liberty Records (1955-1971), Dot Records (in LA 1956-present), Arwin Records (late 1950s-mid 1960s), Dunhill Records (1964-1967), and GNP Crescendo Records (1954-present).
There was a sizable live music scene as well including several nightclubs such as Doug Weston’s Troubadour, opened in 1957, that specialized in folk music. The author mentions the famous Troubadour club at least five times! Other live folk music venues at the time included Pandora’s Box (about 1958-1966) and Ed Pearl’s The Ash Grove (1958-1973).
There were many reasons for musicians, particularly folk musicians, to relocate to the Los Angeles area in the 1960s.
The folk music revival of the late 1950s, sparked by the Kingston Trio’s hit “Tom Dooley,” (reminder: Capitol Records), sparked folk music clubs and records all over the United States and indeed the world. A large fraction of the Laurel Canyon musicians were struggling or moderately successful in the folk music scenes in New York/Greenwich Village (John Philips and Cass Elliot of the Mamas and Papas), Toronto (Neil Young and Joni Mitchell), Cambridge (Harvard/Boston), Kansas City etc. There is a long history in the United States of people rebooting or trying to reboot a failed or stagnant career by heading west, especially to California.
Gidget (1959) Advertises Surfing and Southern California
Southern California could offer balmy weather, beaches, and scantily clad members of the opposite sex as well as proximity to the glamorous movie industry and a long history of tolerance for Bohemians and other oddballs compared to much of the country. California was not nearly as expensive in the 1950’s and early 1960’s as it is today.
Books like the 1957 bestseller Gidget and hit movies such as 1959’s Gidget, a sanitized movie version of the book starring Sandra Dee and James Darren, painted an idyllic vision of Southern California for teens and young adults. The Los Angeles music industry began churning out beach songs with the Beach Boys — another Capitol Records band — well before 1965. There were many reasons for struggling or stagnant folk musicians to migrate to LA.
How Typical was Jim Morrison?
Hundreds of musicians, both famous and not so famous, lived in and around Laurel Canyon in the late 1960’s into the 1970’s. An obvious explanation for the presence of ex military kids like Jim Morrison which Dave McGowan acknowledged in many of his interviews is rebellion against their presumably strict military upbringing. Military officers are often stereotyped as distant or even abusive fathers who try to run their family like a military unit, an often unsuccessful method. Dave McGowan argued that while this could explain an excess of military kids, all of the Laurel Canyon musicians were from military or military intelligence families or (in some interviews) all military or super-rich families; Gram Parsons of the Byrds was apparently both.
However, many of the musicians Dave McGowan mentions or even devotes entire chapters to did not have obvious military families. Although John Philips of the Mamas and the Papas father was a retired Marine Corps officer, Cass Elliot (Naomi Cohen)’s father ran a lunch wagon business for construction workers in the Baltimore area, Denny Doherty’s father was a dockworker, and Michelle Phillips (Gilliam)’s father was an LA County probation officer who had served in the military probably during or around World War II (see below for more discussion of World War II).
The book devotes an entire chapter “Endless Vibrations” to the scandalous, sometimes criminal antics of the Beach Boys. The Wilson brothers of the Beach Boys’ father Murry Gage Wilson owned an industrial equipment rental company in the Los Angeles area. Their cousin and fellow Beach Boy Mike Love’s father Edward Milton Love founded and owned Love Sheet Metal Company, another LA business.
Arthur Lee of Love, one of the few African American Laurel Canyon musicians, also the subject of an entire chapter, did not come from a military family. His biological father Chester Taylor was a cornet player. His step-father Clinton Lee was drafted in World War 2 but was a construction worker and stonemason in Los Angeles after the war, not a career military man.
Canadian Neil Young of Buffalo Springfield’s father Scott Alexander Young was a journalist. Fellow Canadian Joni Mitchell (Robert Joan Anderson)’s father William Andrew Anderson served in the Canadian military during World War II but became a grocer after the war. And so on. On close examination, many Laurel Canyon musicians, including many prominently featured in the book, did not come from career military families. While many appear to have come from solidly middle class or upper-middle class backgrounds, only a few are/were clearly super rich before making it big in popular music.
Most of the Laurel Canyon musicians were born in the early 1940s, right before, usually during, and occasionally right after World War II. Their parents were nearly all young adults during the war, the prime age to be drafted or volunteer for the massive war effort. It is estimated about sixteen million Americans served in the military during World War II (about two million in Europe), about eleven percent of the US population.
The US began building up its military and supplying arms to the British Empire years before Pearl Harbor. It took some time to somewhat demobilize the military after World War II with the Cold War perpetuating much of the wartime military and industry. World War II followed the Great Depression, most likely making a military career unusually appealing to this generation.
It is not surprising many Laurel Canyon musicians had parents who served in the World War II military. Many appear to have returned to civilian life. That some did not or had made a career of the military against the backdrop of the Great Depression and sky-high unemployment levels is also not that surprising.
The Classified Lookout Mountain Film Studio
Laurel Canyon was home to a secret classified film studio and lab on Lookout Mountain, a relatively secluded location up in the hills, from the 1940s until at least 1969. It is apparently now the home of actor Jared Leto. This appears to have been used to produce films of nuclear weapons tests but very little is known about the facility.
Weird Scenes suggests the facility may have somehow managed the Laurel Canyon hippie psyop, but presents no real evidence, even tangential connections between employees of the facility and hippie rockers who presumably at least occasionally passed each other in the Laurel Canyon shops, may have been neighbors, etc.
Mobsters, Manson, and Satanism
Weird Scenes features a Laurel Canyon “death list” of drug overdoses, suspicious accidents, purported suicides and clear murders in and around Laurel Canyon. Charles Manson and his followers had a number of well documented as well as alleged ties to some of the Laurel Canyon musicians, including Dennis Wilson of the Beach Boys. Manson and some others had ties to Anton Szandor LaVey (real name Howard Stanton Levy) and/or his Church of Satan. Heavy drug use and drug dealing permeate the accounts of the Laurel Canyon music scene.
Charles Manson Mug Shot (1968)
The book connects Laurel Canyon to many scandals and crimes, mostly in the LA area and in some cases alleges ties to various organized crime figures. The book manages to pull in everything from the death of stage magician and escape artist Houdini who lived in Laurel Canyon for a while, the Black Dahlia murder in 1947, the Tate-LaBianca (Manson) murders, and the so-called Wonderland murders in July of 1981 well after the Laurel Canyon music scene had peaked. Most of this has little to do with military intelligence or the CIA on the surface.
The book is not alone in suggesting a link between the “intelligence community” and Charles Manson. Tom O’Neil’s Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties (Little Brown and Company, June 25, 2019) speculates Manson and his cult were a CIA MK-ULTRA mind control and COINTELPRO operation to discredit the hippies and undermine the anti-war and/or anti-establishment movements of the time — not unlike Dave McGowan’s theory.
Perhaps. The evidence is rather weak. What then to make of the history of crime and scandal including Manson associated with Laurel Canyon?
The Sunset Strip, home to the nightclubs associated with the Laurel Canyon folk rock revolution music scene has a long and shady history. The Sunset Strip is only a few miles from the entrance to Laurel Canyon, an easy commute by car even today (about eight to eighteen minutes by car on Mondays at 8:30 AM according to Google). Google Maps reports it is an hour and a half walk from the so-called Houdini Estate in Laurel Canyon to the infamous Viper Room nightclub on Sunset Strip today.
The Pandora’s Box coffee house/nightclub (about 1958 to 1966) that specialized in folk music was located at 8118 Sunset Boulevard, about 1.4 miles from the Houdini Estate, only about four to eight minutes by car on Mondays at 8:30 AM today.
The Sunset Strip started out as an unincorporated region connecting Beverly Hills to the west and Hollywood to the east with lax law enforcement. In the 1920s it became home to nightclubs, speakeasies, strip clubs and other dubious operations often associated with the gangsters of the Prohibition era, a pattern generally agreed to have continued up to at least the 1950s.
The nightclubs catered to the Hollywood elite as well as the general public and often were associated with prostitution, gambling, drug dealing, and other illegal activities. Notorious mobsters such as Bugsy Siegel and his successor Micky Cohen frequented many of the nightclubs and were said to control some or all of them. Other nightclubs nearby, not on Sunset Boulevard, had similar reputations and histories.
One of the prime suspects in the gruesome Black Dahlia murder in 1947 was Mark Hansen, owner or co-owner of the huge Florentine Gardens nightclub (5955 Hollywood Boulevard). Elizabeth Short, the so-called Black Dahlia, was one of many young women who frequented the huge nightclub and stayed intermittently in Hansen’s bungalow behind the Florentine Gardens. Someone claiming to be the killer mailed a package with Short’s birth certificate, social security card, other personal items, and an address book with Mark Hansen’s name on the cover to the Los Angeles Examiner newspaper making Hansen one of the prime suspects. Hansen was widely believed to be mob connected at the time.
Historically, entertainment is a great business for laundering money because theater tickets, nightclub tickets, records and CD’s etc. were usually purchased with cash. Drug dealing, prostitution, illegal gambling and many other illegal activities generate large amounts of cash.
There are both widespread rumors and several documented scandals such as the extortion conviction of Morris Levy suggesting deep organized crime involvement in the music industry and payoffs to DJs and radio stations to play music on the air.
Charles Manson, for example, looks suspiciously like an underworld character who was selling drugs and women to the Laurel Canyon elite. Perhaps he truly went nuts or perhaps he was stiffed in a drug deal or other illegal transaction — or set up as a fall guy by some other nefarious persons. None of this requires the CIA or military intelligence or a psyop to discredit the anti-war movement.
The Death of Dave McGowan
Shortly after Weird ScenesInside the Canyon was published, Dave McGowan died, reportedly from pancreatic cancer. The common highly aggressive form of pancreatic cancer usually kills in about six months.
Dave McGowan had been a little known “conspiracy theory,” usually a loaded pejorative term, writer with various articles, a web site, and several books prior to publication of Weird Scenes which did much better, garnering numerous reviews and sales on Amazon. He was interviewed on podcasts, radio and video a lot after Weird Scenes was published. This has led to suggestions that the book was too successful and the conspiracy killed him, presumably using a carcinogenic agent.
Certainly his death does seem a bit too coincidental. That said, about nine percent of Americans die in their fifties usually from common diseases such as cancer and heart attacks associated with old age. Dave McGowan was about fifty-five (55) when he died.
Conclusion
It is impossible at present to rule out the thesis of Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon but the case presented is weak. There was a vibrant music industry in LA in the late 1950s and early 1960s. There was a vibrant live music scene in LA dating back at least to the Sunset Strip of the 1920s. There were many reasons for folk musicians in particular to move to LA and Laurel Canyon near the live music venues in the mid 1960s.
Many of the Laurel Canyon musicians had negligible family or personal ties to the military, military intelligence, or the CIA. Several, most notably Jim Morrison, did have such ties which might make one wonder.
The scandals, crimes, and various shady goings on associated with Laurel Canyon and with the Laurel Canyon music scene probably reflect organized crime involvement in nightclubs and the music business dating back to the 1920s rather than some larger intelligence community plot.
(C) 2022 by John F. McGowan, Ph.D.
About Me
John F. McGowan, Ph.D. solves problems using mathematics and mathematical software, including developing gesture recognition for touch devices, video compression and speech recognition technologies. He has extensive experience developing software in C, C++, MATLAB, Python, Visual Basic and many other programming languages. He has been a Visiting Scholar at HP Labs developing computer vision algorithms and software for mobile devices. He has worked as a contractor at NASA Ames Research Center involved in the research and development of image and video processing algorithms and technology. He has published articles on the origin and evolution of life, the exploration of Mars (anticipating the discovery of methane on Mars), and cheap access to space. He has a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a B.S. in physics from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech).
