Goodfellas: The Dark Tower and Beyond Part II

Welcome to the second installment in my examination of the Orange One's rather lengthy association with organized crime and even more sinister institutions. This series grew out of a prior blog I had published several months ago that detailed the curious saga of Resorts International, a gaming company that found itself at the center of a host of intrigues over the years.

Resorts had close ties to at least two American presidents --Trump and another controversial Republican, Richard M. Nixon --in addition to a rogue's gallery that included frequent patrons such as Howard Hughes and fugitive financier Robert Vesco; LSD baron William Mellon Hitchcock, who held stock in the company; and the inevitable Syndicate figures. It also owned a controlling interest in one of the earliest private intelligence companies. It was known as Intertel and it employed a host of "former" US intelligence personnel.

Intertel found itself at the center of scandal in the early 1970s, when it played a key role in what was either a rescue or an abduction of Howard Hughes from one of his Las Vegas casinos in 1970. Regardless, Hughes would be closely "guarded" Intertel agents for the rest of his life. During this time frame few were allowed even a glimpse of the reclusive billionaire until an unrecognizable corpse purporting to be Hughes turned up in 1976.

Intertel was still a part of Resorts in the late 1970s when the gaming interest began pushing for the legalization of gambling in Atlantic City. It would ultimately open up the first casino there and would begin construction on what became the Taj Mahal. It was at this juncture Trump became involved with the entity, buying a controlling interest in the company around 1986 and becoming its CEO. Eventually Trump was bought out by Merv Griffin, but he retained control of the Taj and became a key figure in the checkered history of Resorts.

But Resorts was hardly the first time Trump had operated in the ratified world of spooks and organized crime. As was noted in the first installment of this series, Trump had already established ample ties to the Five Families in addition to the Philadelphia crime family and even the emerging Russian Mafia by the mid-1980s.

Among these organized crime ties is one particular individual who leads into a whole other netherworld involving a shadowy private security company with its own ample ties to organized crime and intelligence agencies.

Mafia and Fort Bragg Intrigues

When I last left off I was detailing the exploits of Edward "Biff" Halloran, a reputed member of the Genovese crime family. Halloran, who owned multiple business including a hotel and racetrack, had established a near monopoly on the New York City concrete industry by the 1980s. It was in this capacity that he became involved with Trump, having provided the concrete to Trump's first building project, the Hyatt, in addition to his flagship building, Trump Tower (which, as noted in part one, was a longtime hot bed of money laundering for various criminal organizations). 

Prior to hooking up with Trump, Halloran had taken on a most interesting business partner during the early 1970s: Bradley Bryant.

Bryant was a product of Lexington, Kentucky, where he grew up in an upper middle glass family. His grandfather was in fact a former mayor of Lexington. He would later attend the exclusive Sewanee Military Academy where he gained many contacts in Lexington high society. He graduated in 1962 and a year later attempted to qualify for the Naval Academy at Annapolis, but was rejected. He later joined the Marines for a time before ending up in Philadelphia at the end of the 1960s, where he worked a corporate job.

In 1970, Halloran tapped Bryant to run the Armstrong Corporation, an industrial waste service Halloran ran out of Philadelphia. Bryant's tenure at Armstrong was most productive and he learned much from Halloran. In 1975 he started his own company and while successful, he soon became board with "legitimate" business. Shortly thereafter he began selling small quantities of drugs Lexington Police officer Andrew "Drew" Thornton had stolen from the department and suspects he shook down. Thornton had attended Sewanee with Bryant and the two had remained close friends ever since.

Thornton came from the same type of upper middle class background as Bryant, rubbing shoulders with Kentucky's gentry as youth while not actually be a part of them. He had joined the Lexington Police in 1968 and soon ended up on the city's first narcotics strike force. Many believed this move was to fill the void left by the derailment of a promising military career. In 1963 Thornton had joined the US Army and had insisted on becoming a paratrooper.

This led to Thornton being assigned to the 82nd Airborne Division at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. Regular readers of this blog will no doubt be aware of the significance of this move, but for those unaware: In addition to the 82nd Airborne, Fort Bragg is home to most of the nation's elite Special Operations Forces. Both the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) and the Army Special Forces (more commonly known as Green Berets) are headquarted there.

In more recent years Fort Bragg has also been at the heart of controversy surrounding potential right wing indoctrination there. As was noted before here, during the '90s several troops with Nazi leanings were convicted of murdering an African American couple in the nearby area. Also present at Fort Bragg during this time was Wade Michael Page, a white supremacist who would go on to shoot up a Sikh temple in 2012.

Curiously, one of Trump's key national security advisers, General Keith Kellogg was also present at Fort Bragg during this time, commanding Thornton's old unit, the 82nd Airborne. Thornton left the Army in 1965 due to an injury he suffered during the US invasion of the Dominican Republic during that same year. Kellogg reportedly didn't join the Army until '67, but a lot of his service record appears to have been recently scrubbed online. He graduated from high school in 1961, a year before Thornton, and appears to have decided on a military career due to his involvement with JROTC while in high school, but what he did between '61 and '67 and when his airborne training at Fort Bragg was undertaken is a mystery. While it is highly unlikely, there is a chance Thornton and Kellogg encountered one another during this time.

General Keith Kellogg

It is also interesting to note that right wing extremists were not the only products of Fort Bragg during the 1990s. During the early part of that decade, many of the founding members of the notorious Mexican drug cartel Los Zetas were also trained at Fort Bragg. The Zetas of course went on to become possibly the most notorious and certainly sophisticated drug cartel operating in Mexico for close to two decades now. By all accounts they've played a key role in destablizing the country, which is especially significant in light of the early involvement of the Fort Bragg-based Green Berets in what is commonly referred to as Operation Gladio (noted before here).

But almost two decades before the Zetas, another Fort Bragg alumni had already established a highly sophisticated drug-and-arms trafficking network domestically. And on that note, let us return to the matter at hand.

The Company  

Based on the success of the small scale dealings, Bryant and Thornton soon expanded their operations and the end results would be one of the most complex drug and arms trafficking organizations of the era.

"By the late seventies, the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA)... in Las Vegas had focused on Caesars Palace is the headquarters of a multimillion-dollar, international drug-smuggling organization the called itself 'The Company.' Whether a renegade offshoot of the CIA, which was commonly called 'the company' in intelligence circles, or not, it was a highly sophisticated, impenetrable enterprise. The DEA was force, with some embarrassment, to admit that 'The Company' surpassed the federal government's crime-fighting abilities. Codenaming the Caesars Palace drug trafficking and money-laundering probe Operation Jaeger, the DEA admitted in a highly confidential internal memorandums to Washington superiors that 'the magnitude, scope, and complexity of the operations' exceeded its field capabilities. At the heart of the Las Vegas investigation was a Texas highroller named Jamiel 'Jimmy' Chagra, an American drug kingpin tied to the Patriarca crime family in New England and the Chicago Syndicate."

(The Money and the Power, Sally Denton & Roger Morris, pg. 326)

Las Vegas' Caesars Palace, which we shall return too

Chagra is a most interesting figure whom shall be addressed in just a moment, but for now let us continue with the layout of "the Company." By the mid-1970s Bryant and Thornton already had wide-reaching ambitions as well as the means to pull them off.

"Bradley and Drew had formed Executive Protection Ltd. in 1975 – a corporation owned and operated by Bradley Bryant and Drew Thornton to which they would refer in private conversations as 'the Company.' But it wasn't until 1977 that the two men felt capable of putting 'the Company' into full-scale action. They recruited operatives, drawing from a pool of former police officers and drug agents from various state, local and federal agencies.

" 'The Company' could serve two purposes for them: to provide cover for drug-smuggling ventures and to serve as a legitimate private security service. Bradley had met dozens of people, through Chandler in Vegas and through Halloran in Philadelphia, who had the need and wherewithal to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for sophisticated bodyguard protection. Through their allies in the law enforcement and SOF world, they had plenty of contract employees to perform both security and drug trafficking services.

"Meanwhile the security company provided a perfect cover for acquiring weapons, assimilating a private army of enforcers and obtaining airplanes ostensibly needed to shuttle clients into foreign countries, from which Bradley and Drew could then import marijuana back to the United States...

"They had spent several years amassing the tools of their trade: AR-15s, Uzis, AK-47s, Ingrams, Walther PPKs, cartons of ammo, electronic surveillance equipment, nightscopes, explosives, night-vision goggles. Now it was time to put them to use.

 "Bradley claimed that his cousin, Larry Bryant, would help them add to their cache of arms, using his top-secret Defense Department security clearance to embezzle scopes and radar equipment from the highly restricted Navy weapons-testing center at China Lake in California's Mojave Desert.

"Forging a subsidiary partnership with his police colleague, Bill Canan, Drew bought a remote farm on a bluff overlooking the Kentucky River, where they would train their employees in guerrilla war tactics and hide their growing stash of weapons.

"Bradley and Drew also had a ready-make client base to buy their product. They had access to Kentucky's big-money horse crowd, the Philadelphia Main Line group, and the Vegas gamblers. Their blue-blood connections proved even stronger than they had anticipated, as they found Lexington society to be a huge market for illicit drugs. In fact, it was a larger market than they could supply.

"Both men considered Kentucky their strong and secret asset. Kentucky was a haven of remote landing strips, nonexistent law enforcement, crooked politicians, lax airports, and rivers leading to the Gulf of Mexico."

(The Bluegrass Conspiracy, Sally Denton, pgs. 64-65)

an Ingram Mac-10, which plays a curious role in our story

There's a lot to take in here. Many of these allegations will be examined in depth over the course of this blog, but for now I would like emphasize Biff Halloran's role in all of this. He clearly played a key role in setting up "the Company" with wealthy clientele during the early going in the Philadelphia area. This would have been shortly before Halloran began supplying concrete to Trump, but construction on the Grand Hyatt New York was well underway by the time "the Company" was at its peak of influence.

By the late 1980s Trump would develop quite an obsession with private security, accumulating what has been described as a private army at times. During the Company's peak years Trump likely didn't have the means for such services, but his path does seem to have frequently intersected with the Company's, as we shall see.

Before moving on, its worth emphasizing again the scale of Biff Halloran's reach. Not only did he help set up an extremely elaborate drugs-and-arm trafficking outfit in his early years, but he also played a key role in the rise of a future president. This is quite a feat for a mere member of the Genovesse crime family. Couple this with his shadowy disappearance in 1996, and one is left with quite a mystery.

About the Help

But back to the Company. Let's start by considering the personnel that Bryant and Thornton recruited. In addition to numerous former law enforcement officers, they also drew from the ranks of what the great Sally Denton referred to as the "Soldier of Fortune crowd."

"During the mid-1970s, Bradley and Drew had become deeply involved with what is known as the SOF crowd – a group of freelance military advisers and mercenaries whose unofficial leader is Robert Brown, the publisher of Soldier of Fortune magazine. How that association developed is not clear. Since both Bradley and Drew had been gung ho military types who fancied themselves as paramilitary experts, the SOF crowd was a natural melting pot. At the annual Las Vegas convention of soldiers of fortune, Bradley and Drew came into contact with a number of Vietnam veterans who were looking for action. 

"It was time, Bradley convinced Drew in 1977, to use those contacts for profit. Under the auspices of a private security firm, hiring independent contractors through the classified advertisements in Soldier of Fortune, they would find a retinue of pilots who weren't afraid of the risks and danger – pilots who enjoyed the challenge of flying below radar in the middle of the night and into remote jungle landing strips of foreign countries to pick up a load."

(The Bluegrass Conspiracy, Sally Denton, pgs. 63-64)

Robert K. Brown

The use of Robert K. Brown's Soldier of Fortune magazine to recruit pilots and mercs by Bryant and Thornton is most interesting. Brown himself has a long and storied history in covert operations and his magazine seems to have assisted the US intelligence community in this capacity for decades.

Prior to becoming a publisher, however, Brown was a soldier. He first entered the US Army in 1954 and served until '57. He then returned in '64 and participated in Vietnam. At some point he was trained in intelligence as well. Warren Hinckle and William Turner in their classic Deadly Secrets note "... Brown was a graduate of the counterintelligence school Fort Holabird, Maryland..." (pg. 180).

This is most interesting. Fort Holabird was specifically known for training the Army Counterintelligence Corp (CIC), which participated heavily in the Army's branch of Project ARTICHOKE. As was noted before here, ARTICHOKE experiments were conducted at Holabird during the mid-1950s as well. Unfortunately, I have been unable to determine when Brown went through Holabird.

By the time Brown was dispatched to Vietnam, he had become a Green Beret. As was noted above, Army Special Forces are based out of Fort Bragg and it is thus highly likely Brown went through airborne training at Fort Bragg at some point as part of his Green Beret training.

During Vietnam Green Berets were used extensively in the CIA's highly controversial Phoenix Program, which in some accounts is alleged to have killed up to 30,000 "insurgents." In Douglas Valentine's classic The Phoenix Program, Valentine indicates Brown was a participant in Phoenix and that he later started the "Phoenix Associates" in 1974 for veterans of the program.

During his time out of the service in the late 1950s and early 1960s Brown assisted in the efforts to overthrow Castro by training Cubans and enlisting American mercenaries in such efforts. Unsurprisingly, Brown has also been linked to the Kennedy assassination as well.

"... according to an FBI reports prepared in the wake of the JFK assassination, Brown 'advised that he had been active in Cuban matters for several years and during the spring of 1963, in connection with anti-Castro activity, he was in contact with the National States Rights Party in Los Angeles, California. In connection with this, he contacted Dr. Stanley L. Drennan (of North Hollywood, a Party activist). Brown stated that once while a guest at Dr. Drennan's home, Drennan stated in general conversation that he could not do it, but what the organization needed was a group of young men to get rid of Kennedy, the Cabinet and all members of Americans for Democratic Action and maybe 10,000 other people. Brown stated that he considered the remark as being "crackpot"; however, as tDrennan continued the conversation, he gained the impression that Drennan may have been propositioning him on this matter.' "

(Spooks, Jim Hougan, pg. 76n)

Brown stayed active in various intrigues after Vietnam as well. By the mid-1970s he was using Soldier of Fortune to recruit mercs to fight in various southern African nations such as Rhodesia. By the 1980s his efforts had gained near official sanction. In The Phoenix Program, Douglas Valentine notes that "... the person initially chosen by North to resupply the contras was former SOG commander John Singlaub, who in doing so worked with Soldier of Fortune publisher Robert Brown..." (pg. 428).

General John Singlaub

As was noted before here, General John Singlaub was a longtime darling of the far right in addition to a decades-spanning career in the blackest of black ops. Singlaub was a part of the infamous "China cowboys" clique of former OSS men that would continue to promote a far right agenda for decades in the US intelligence community. Another member was infamous arms dealer Mitchell WerBell III, another frequent collaborator of Brown's.

WerBell is a figure briefly addressed in the initial "Goodfellas" post dealing with Resorts International. During the mid-1970s WerBell partnered with rogue financier Robert Vesco, a frequent guest of Resorts' Paradise Island casino. At one point Vesco even considered purchasing said casino.

WerBell is worth dwelling on for a moment as there are many similarities between WerBell's operation and the Company's. For years WerBell aided the CIA and various corporate clients (WerBell famously plotted a coup in Haiti at the behalf of CBS during the 1960s that the network planned to film while it was in progress) in supplying various regimes with weapons in addition to assisting in the occasional coup. WerBell was also implicated in trafficking drugs at times, but not nearly to the extent of the Company.

WerBell

Like the Company, WerBell operated through various corporations such as Defense Services Inc (which provided arms and military training to various regimes) and the Military Armament Corporation (which manufactured the coveted Ingram Mac-10 and Mac-11 in addition to the silencers WerBell personally designed for the weapons). In total WerBell operated up to eight companies at one point, providing his operations with a degree legitimacy via reputable corporate and state clients.

Of course, WerBell had many less the reputable clients as well. There are longstanding rumors that some such clients received special training at compound WerBell owned in Georgia.

"... The Farm --sixty acres of rolling beauty-in-the-boondocks, located near Atlanta in Powder Springs. It might be thought that a lack of imagination gave The Farm its name, but that isn't so. One says 'The Farm' in much the same way that Bela Lugosi might say 'The La-bor-a-tory'; the name's emptiness is meant to hint at clandestine activities incapable of bearing the weight of sunlight. And, more specifically, it's meant to hint at (and even be confused with) the CIA training facility at Camp Peary, Virginia, also called The Farm.

"And like its government counterpart to the north, WerBell's Farm was not known for its contributions to agriculture or animal husbandry. It was instead devoted to perfecting the tools and techniques of sniping, counterinsurgency, and the coup d'etat. Weapons, men, and tactics of war were all tested on the elaborate shooting range that substituted for a garden."

(Spooks, Jim Hougan, pg. 29)

a little small arms training at The Farm

As was noted above, the Company had their own curious compound, which shall be addressed further in a moment.

While I've found no evidence of a direct connection between WerBell and the Company, it is highly probable that one existed. Beyond the similarities between both operations, both recruited heavily from Soldier of Fortune, run by WerBell's good friend and frequent collaborator, Robert K. Brown. As was noted above, Ingrams were one of the firearms the Company dealt in and WerBell was one of the largest distributors on Ingrams in the 1970s. What's more, he was not very discerning about whom he sold them too, so long as they were suitably anti-Communist (which the Company surely was).

Finally, Bradley Bryant relocated to Savannah, Georgia in the late 1970s on Company business. Most of WerBell's operations were also based out of Georgia, specifically Atlanta and the surrounding area. As such, it seems highly likely that the two operations were aware of one another. This researcher suspects that WerBell's operations may even have provided a kind of inspiration to Bryant and Thornton. But moving along.

The Drugs and Other Contraband

As was noted above, the first large scale drug suppliers the Company hooked up with were the Chagra brothers, Lee and Jimmy. Hailing from Texas, the Chagra brothers first gained notoriety while working as attorneys. They specialized in defending drug dealers and eventually the temptation to participate in that particular trade became too great. By the time the Chagras hooked up with the Company, they were considered to be among the largest suppliers of illicit drugs in the nation.

"The meeting of Bradley Bryant and Jimmy Chagra was a fortuitous combination of like-minded souls. Though the organization of Bradley and Drew had met with success, they couldn't have dreamed up a better association. In 1978 the Chagras were considered by the DEA to be the kingpins in the country's largest heroin, cocaine, marijuana, and firearms distribution system. Not only did the Chagras have their own cocaine and marijuana suppliers in Columbia, a source for Lebanese heroin, and connections to Middle Eastern terrorists, but their organized-crime connections in the United States were said to be at the highest levels of the traditional La Cosa Nostra."

(The Bluegrass Conspiracy, Sally Denton, pg. 73)

Jimmy Chagra

The partnership between the Company and the Chagra brothers was said to have grown out of Bradley Bryant's mob contacts in Las Vegas and Philadelphia (i.e. Biff Halloran). Frequently the Company and the Chagras conducted business at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas, which both parties used to launder money through. 

It was not long after the partnership was cemented that the Chagras began their fall from grace. It began with Lee Chagra being assassinated in December of 1978, likely on the orders of the Patriarca crime family. 

Then, in 1979, Jimmy Chagra was charged by federal authorities with drug trafficking. Chagra responded by ordering the assassination of the judge he faced in court, "Maximum" John Wood. The assassin? Charles Harrelson, an associate of the Dixie Mafia who also happened to be the father of actor Woody Harrelson. When authorities went to arrest Charles Harrelson for the murder of Wood, there was a brief standoff. During these tense moments, while Harrelson was high on cocaine, he confessed to both the assassination of Judge John Wood... and President John F. Kennedy. This has fueled speculation for years that Harrelson was one of the infamous "Three Tramps" on the Grassy Knoll. But I digress.

Around this same time Bradley Bryant would also start experiencing legal woes. Both Bryant and Jimmy Chagra ended up using the same attorney --the Las Vegas-based Oscar Goodman, who became legendary for his defense of organized crime figures while practicing law. Eventually both he and his wife would serve as mayor of Las Vegas. It was during Oscar's time as mayor that Donald Trump opened his first hotel in Vegas. Goodman would assist Trump in developing the site. But moving along.

Oscar Goodman (right) with Trump at the ribbon cutting ceremony for Trump's Vegas hotel

After Chagra's downfall and Bradley Bryant's subsequent arrest, Drew Thornton established another supplier: the Medellin Cartel. His contact with the Colombians was a most curious fellow as well. His name was Bertram Gordon, nominally a jet setting international businessman. In reality, Gordon was a key figure in the international drug market of the 1980s.

"The DEA believed that Gordon provided aircraft for the entire Medellin Cartel – the Colombian cocaine import and distribution network responsible for 80 percent of the cocaine entering the United States and Canada. Gordon, according to the DEA, worked directly for Carlos Lehder – the convicted Colombian billionaire whose cocaine empire was part of his political vision to destabilize America. 

"The reason the DEA knew so much about Bert Gordon was because Gordon worked for them..."

(The Bluegrass Conspiracy, Sally Denton. pgs. 349-350)

Yes, Bert Gordon, who was linked to Drew Thornton's mysterious death in 1984, was also a DEA informant in addition to being a close associate of Hitler-worshiping Carlos Lehder. Lehder's longstanding obsession with Nazism has been chronicled before here. 

Before wrapping up this section, its also interesting to note another curious piece of smuggling the Company engaged during the late 1970s: namely, the theft of classified weapons from the highly classified Naval Air Weapons Station China Lake facility. As was noted above, this feat was greatly aided by the assistance of Bradley Bryant's cousin, Larry Bryant, a Department of Defense civilian employee with Top Secret clearance. Here are a few more details about Larry and China Lake thefts.

"... Larry Bryant, about whether he had obtained the military equipment he had promised Bradley. Stationed at Nellis Air Force Base in Las Vegas, Larry Bryant possessed a national security clearance to work on classified radar systems, and had offered to provide Bradley with sophisticated electronic deception equipment from the government's top-secret China Lake.

"Bradley was especially anxious to receive several Starlight nightvision scopes and IFF Radar, called the 'Green Box.' The Green Box, nicknamed 'friend or foe,' is a classified devised that U.S. military aircraft used for communicating with other military installations and friendly countries. Such an instrument would allow Bradley's drug-smuggling aircraft to enter and leave numerous Central and South American countries, his planes sending a signal that they were friendly, without resorting to radio communication."

(The Bluegrass Conspiracy, Sally Denton, pgs. 83-84)

After the legal troubles began for the Bryants in 1980, Larry Bryant told authorities an interesting story while being questioned about how classified military hardware from China Lake had ended up in Bradley's possession.

"He claimed that several nightsscopes had been retrieved from China Lake to be traded to Libya for a Soviet radar system the Libyans had purchased from the Russians. The U.S. government wanted to examine the Russian system, according to Larry Bryant's scenario, in order to duplicate it. All of the China Lake employees implicated in the disappearance of the items were top-secret specialists in long-range, surface-to-air radar systems, as was Larry Bryant.

"Larry Bryant contended that the covert operation was going to save the US government millions of dollars in research and development costs. 'We're good guys; we work for Uncle Sam,' said one of the employees later indicted for pilfering the equipment."

(The Bluegrass Conspiracy, Sally Denton, pg. 127)

Specifically, the Bryants and other implicated China Lake employees claimed that the thefts were sanctioned by the CIA. By the time of the Bryants' arrest, Bradley and Drew Thornton had been claiming their operations were sanctioned by the CIA for several years. More than a few of the federal employees tasked with investigating the Company had come to similar conclusions.

Keep the allegations concerning Libya in mind dear reader, as we shall return to this point in the next installment. For now, there is one final aspect of the Company's operation I would like to address before wrapping up.

Triad

Finally, we come to the mysterious compound the Company operated in rural Kentucky. It was operated by a corporation Bryant and Thornton founded called Triad and soon drew the attention of both local residents and federal agents for the strange happenings there. Some dealt with more concrete concerns, such as indications the compound was being used to stockpile arms and engage in paramilitary training.

"Other federal agencies had also been enticed by rumors of arms-stockpiling and mercenary training at Triad. U.S. Customs agents in New York, who were monitoring the activities of Saudi arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi, briefly entertained the possibility that Triad was a subsidiary of Khashoggi's Triad American Corporation. The fact that Khashoggi was frequenting Lexington added fuel to the speculation.

"...The FBI in Lexington had received reports that foreign 'dark-skinned' soldiers of unknown nationality – possibly Libyan or Nicaraguan – were being trained at Triad in guerrilla warfare techniques. Some of the report suggested the Triad was CIA-sponsored... ATF had conducted an investigation into activities at Triad that had concluded that those attending the 'camp' were 'survivalists who on occasion dress in military fatigues and play war games – i.e., shoot each other with plastic bullets containing red blood-like dye, parachute from airplanes, firearms training, etc.' Triad evidently offered training in self-defense, advanced first aid, radiation detection, and the perfection of individual survival skills. ATF investigators found that trainees rappelled off the back cliffs of the farm down to the Kentucky river bed, while avoiding automatic fire. But ATF found 'no information indicating any connection between above-described activity and foreign/domestic terrorism, guerrilla warfare, and other activity possibly in violation of neutrality laws.' "

(The Bluegrass Conspiracy, Sally Denton, pgs. 114-115)

Right. A few "survivalist" types were able to come up with the cash to keep such an elaborate operation profitable. And a threat later made to state police who had infiltrated the compound --that the Company would shoot down any more surveillance flights the state police sent over the compound --was just in jest.

Before moving on to other allegations surrounding the compound, it is interesting to note its connection the infamous arms trafficker Adnan Khashoggi. For years Khashoggi was a key CIA asset who may have also been plugged into Le Cercle, an international fascist network (noted before here) of some notoriety.

Khashoggi

Khashoggi was also a friend and some time rival of the Orange One. They frequently encountered one another in New York social circles during the 1980s and Trump reportedly designed his apartment living room in Trump Tower to be larger than the one Khashoggi had in his Olympic Tower apartment. Trump eventually bought Khashoggi's "megayacht," the Nabila and renamed it the Trump Princess, But moving along.

Probably the strangest aspect of the Triad compound are the allegations encountered by state cop Ralph Ross, for years the lead investigator of Drew Thornton in Kentucky, of occult activity at the compound.

"Coincidentally, Ralph had suddenly been receiving complaints about suspicious activity on Triad. Neighbors had reported to state police that a cult of devil worshipers frequented the property, and that the constant firing automatic weapons could be heard..."

(The Bluegrass Conspiracy, Sally Denton, pg. 114)

This takes us into some truly muddy waters. As I'm sure fans of the late, great David McGowan are well aware, there have been allegations for decades of paramilitary training compounds spread out across the nation with an occult flavor that "trained" various serial killers.

These allegations probably originate with infamous serial killer Henry Lee Lucas, who in the 1980s claimed to a member of a cult he called the Hand of Death. As was noted before here, Lucas alleged that this cult trained out of a paramilitary compound located in the Florida Everglades. While nominally this claim seems ridiculous, it is important to remember that anti-Castro Cubans were being trained in paramilitary camps in the Everglades up until at least the early 1960s. What's more, this training was largely being overseen by the same mercenaries who would later gravitate to Robert K. Brown's Soldier of Fortune crowd. Brown himself was quite active in assisting the anti-Castro Cubans during the early 1960s as well.

Henry

Carlos Lehder, the Hitler-worshiping Medellin Cartel associate who would end up supplying Thornton, also had an interesting connection to this anti-Castro Cuban crowd as well. During the height of his influence, he set up shop on Norman's Cay in the Bahamas, which was used as a base for Lehder's operations as well as resupplies for cocaine being shipped from Columbia to North America. As was noted before here, before Lehder took possession of the island, it was used by anti-Castro Cubans and American mercenaries to stage raids on Cuba. Robert Vesco, the fugitive financier who collaborated with WerBell in the 1970s and frequented visited Resorts' Paradise Island casino during that decade, was also a regular guest of Lehder's at Norman's Cay during the 1980s. But back to the matter at hand.

As was noted before here, Henry' claim was further bolstered by the discovery of Adolfo Constanzo's ranch near Matamoros, Mexico (which is directly across the border from Brownsville, Texas) in 1989. Constanzo was a Cuban-American occultist who became a major figure in the Mexican drug trade during the 1980s. Constanzo and his followers were believed to have performed human sacrifices at this ranch in addition to storing large amounts of contraband there. Prior to the discovery of the ranch, Lucas had alleged the Hand of Death kept a ranch near Matamoros for such purposes. It is also interesting to note that Constanzo was almost surely an affiliate of the Gulf Cartel, which the above-mentioned Los Zetas originally belonged to as enforcers before breaking away (noted before here).

Constanzo

All of this leads me to believe there is merit to these allegations of paramilitary compounds. Certainly both the Company and Mitchell WerBell maintained such places during the 1970s and were reported to have trained some curious figures there. Henry Lee Lucas' alleged Florida Everglades site has precedence with the sites used by anti-Castro Cubans in the early 1960s, a network that both Robert K. Brown and Mitch WerBell were deeply involved with.And of course there's the possibility that Constanzo, who was born in Miami during the early 1960s, was raised in such circles.

While this might seem like a strange digression, I would further expand of this serial killer cult theme in the next installment. Also up for consideration Bryant and Thornton's contacts in Lexington's upper crust as well as further ties Trump has to the Company. And finally, I may even get around to considering the implications of it all. Stay tuned dear reader.

The JFK Assassination: A Strange and Terrible Saga Part VI

Welcome to the sixth in my examination of the assassination of JFK. Over the course of the first two parts of this series I considered the two regions --Dallas/Forth Worth and New Orleans --where Oswald resided before the assassination, upon his return from the Soviet Union, and the synchronicities and high strangeness that surrounded these stays. During the third installment I outlined the plotters behind the assassination while part four considered possible ties figures who appear in assassination lore had to the CIA's behavior modification experiments, most notably Project Artichoke.

In the fifth I began to consider the presence of various secret societies and orders that appear around the assassination, first briefly touching upon the over-emphasized Masonic presence before breaking down the appearance of members Skull and Bones as well as the Sovereign Military Order of Malta (SMOM) in assassination lore.

The SMOM, more commonly referred to as the Knights of Malta, is one of the most mysterious secret societies around. Its presence near the Kennedy assassination is rarely addressed despite the fact that more than a few individuals who played a role in the assassination and subsequent cover-up (i.e. Allen Dulles, James Jesus Angleton, Dame of Malta Clare Booth Luce, etc) were members of the SMOM. Claiming direct lineage to the Medieval Knights Hospitallers, the SMOM frequently appears in conspiracy literature as an extension of the Masons though there is little basis for these claims. If anything, the two orders seem to have been rather bitter rivals, as discussed in part five.

Before moving along to other aspects of the assassination there is one final secret society that I would like to consider: the Sovereign Order of Saint John of Jerusalem, Knights of Malta (SOSJ, sometimes referred to as the "Shickshinny Knights of Malta" due to the order's long time headquarters being based out of Shickshinny, Pennsylvania). Like the SMOM, this knightly order claimed descent from the Knights Hospitallers, but via the Russian line of succession. While these claims are highly dubious the order and its long time Grand Master, Charles Pichel, fell under the patronage of the Romanov family, most notably Grand Duke Cyril and his son Grand Duke Vladimir, by the 1930s. Pichel himself was also suspected of having ties to Nazi intelligence during WWII and even boasted of it in the post-war era.

By the late 1950s the order began to attract several former high ranking military officers and even a few CIA assets into its membership roles. One of the most notable was Major General Charles Willoughby, Douglas MacArthur's long time chief of intelligence in the Far East. In the wake of WWII Willoughby became involved with the Golden Lily (the gold and other precious metals Imperial Japan had looted during the war, some of which was later hidden in underground vaults in the Philippines) as well as the yakuza. During the Korean War Willoughby and MacArthur would also be involved in the establishment of Civil Air Transport/Air America (sometimes referred to as Air Opium), giving Willoughby ample contacts in organized crime as well as access to vast sums of black market gold. More information the SOSJ and Willoughby's criminal enterprises can be found here.

Willoughby

In 1955, a few years after his "retirement" from the military, Willoughby offered his services to Allen Dulles and the CIA despite his public loathing for the Agency. A year later Willoughby would become involved in the formation of what would become known as the World Anti-Communist League (WACL). Willoughby and MacArthur had already helped establish its Asian component, the Asian People's Anti-Communist League (APACL), during the late 1940s and early 1950s.

Its European faction, the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations, had its roots in Nazi Germany and had been brought into the European anti-communist network Dulles, Frank Wisner and James Jesus Angleton began creating in the post-war years. This network also included the Gehlen Org, several Italian fascist organizations, and other fellow travelers. By the late 1950s the flagrant Nazi backgrounds of various members of this network made it a political liability and it was taken off the CIA payrolls. From there on support was provided by a "private aid" network that included Willoughby, then an "agent" for the Hunt oil empire.

H.L. Hunt, one of Willoughby's most notorious patrons

Much of this was noted in part three of this series as well as the possibility that Willoughby himself was directly involved in the assassination. While the possibility of Willoughby's involvement in the assassination is circumstantial, a much more compelling case can be made for his role, as well as that of the SOSJ, in the cover-up. This is especially true of what noted researcher Peter Dale Scott described as the "phase one" cover story of the assassination, namely the perception of Oswald as a communist agent. This possibility was briefly floated by powerful figures within the US intelligence community such Angleton shortly after the assassination before the "phase two" cover story, Oswald as a lone nut, became institutionalized. Many researchers believe that the phase one cover story was used to coerce government officials not party to the assassination to support the lone nut narrative so as to avoid a nuclear world war with the Soviet Union.

It was not simply powerful CIA officials such as Angleton promoting the communist conspiracy, however. This narrative was also taken up by the conspiratorial right and continues to be promoted to this very day. At this "grass roots" level, the SOSJ played a key role in spreading the communist conspiracy narrative.

"After the assassination, Frank Capell was active in disseminating conspiratorial 'phase one' stories linking Oswald to Russia and Ruby to Castro's Cuba... some of them apparently from intelligence sources such as Carlos Bringuier's colleagues in the DRE... Capell was not acting alone: 'phase one' stories linking Oswald and Ruby to Communists were circulated by Willoughby's associate, Philip J. Corso, a veteran of army intelligence who had retired by 1963 to work for the segregationist Senator Strom Thurmond, and Cuban exile Salvador Diaz Verson, a former chief of Cuban military intelligence.

"Corso, the army intelligence veteran, was like Willoughby a foe of the CIA from the right, having tangled with the Agency in his years under C. D. Jackson as a member of Eisenhower's Operations Control Board. In 1963-64 Corso and Willoughby were part of a secret right-wing group, the 'Shickshinny Knights of Malta' (so called after their headquarters in Shickshinny, Pennsylvania, to distinguish them from the more famous Roman Catholic Sovereign Military Order of Malta based in Rome). The group provided a home to dissident retired military officers disaffected with the CIA's internationalism, many of them, like Willoughby and General Bonner Fellers, veterans of the old Hunt-MacArthur-Pawley coalition in the early 1950s. By 1963 the group's leading asset in their anti-CIA propaganda was a Polish intelligence defector, Michal Goleniewski, who had claimed to audiences inside and outside the CIA that the Agency was penetrated by the KGB at a high level.

"Corso built on this anti-CIA paranoia by telling his friend and fellow Senate staffer Julian Sourwine, who made sure it was relayed to the FBI, that Oswald was tied to a communist ring inside the CIA, and was doubling as an informant for the FBI. Shickshinny Knight Herman Kimsey, who claimed to have been Goleniewski's handler inside the CIA, also spun an elaborate story about how his CIA duties had put him in touch with Kennedy's assassin – the mystery man in Mexico. Finally, the chief press contact of the Shickshinny Knights of Malta, Guy Richards of the New York Journal-America, published the claim (soon taken up by Frank Capell, by the John Birch Society, and by Willoughby's American Security Council) that Oswald, like another alleged KGB assassin (Bogdan Stashynsky), had been trained at a KGB assassination school in Minsk. A toned-down version of this story was subsequently published by Julian Sourwine's Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, with help supplied via Senator Thomas Dodd from within the CIA."

(Deep Politics and the Death of JFK, Peter Dale Scott, pgs. 214-215)

Senator Thomas J. Dodd, who sat on the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee with Wickliffe Preston Draper agent Senator James Eastland

The above-mentioned American Security Council (ASC) was a powerful NPO that effectively served as the "voice" of the military-industrial complex (as well as a key cog in the nation's internal security apparatus) from the late 1950s up till the late 1980s. While superficially a "mainstream" organization, it maintained longstanding ties with the patriot movement and frequently used said movement as a spy ring as well as a propaganda organ. More information on the ASC can be found here, here, here and here.

Colonel Philip J. Corso is most well-known to conspiracy researchers due to his role in the UFO field. His book The Day After Roswell was for years the primary source concerning the alleged Roswell crash and his 1997 interview with Art Bell on Coast to Coast AM concerning the UFO question is one of the broadcaster's most famous interviews. By and large he is still held up as a highly credible source in UFO field despite his ties to the SOSJ and work for military intelligence, which placed him in some rather nefarious operations.

Corso, who was the personal emissary to Giovanni Battista Montini (later Pope Paul VI) at the Vatican in the post-WWII era, is widely suspected of playing a role in the establishment of the Nazi "Rat Lines." He would continue to have involvement in the European fascist underground well into the 1950s

"So was Colonel. Philip J. Corso, a twenty-year Army intelligence career man until his retirement in August 1963. He had been the military Operations Coordinating Board's delegate to the CIA group planning the 1954 Guatemalan coup. In 1956 Corso had sought to reactivate fifty surviving garrisons of East European paramilitary units still hanging out in West Germany and tied to the Gehlen spy network. When his Volunteer Freedom Corps, dedicated to rolling back communism, was scuttled as too radical by the Eisenhower administration, Corso attributed the defeat to 'lies by our liberal darlings.' A staunch foe of what he considered a laissez-faire CIA, Corso testified before Congress on 'military muzzling' after General Walker was kicked out of West Germany in 1961..."

(The Man Who Knew Too Much, Dick Russell, pg. 529)

credible?

As noted above, Corso sat on the Operations Coordinating Board along with C.D. Jackson, a psychological warfare expert who became the publisher of Skull and Bonesman Henry Luce's Life magazine by 1960. As noted in part five of this series, both Luce and his wife, Dame of Malta Clare Boothe Luce, may have played some type of role in the assassination. Mrs. Luce was involved with Carlos Bringuier's DRE which, as noted above, was feeding Shickshinny Knight of Malta Frank Capell disinformation about Oswald as a communist as well.

Then there is Polish defector Michael Goleniewski and his alleged CIA handler, Herman Kimsey. These two Shickshinny Knights are quite mysterious in their own respective rights as well.

"Retired CIA official Herman Kimsey (who was listed as the group's 'Associate Chief of International Intelligence' in 1970) was another intriguing Knight. Although Kimsey has been described as a former Chief of Research and Analysis for the CIA, his actual position inside the Agency remains unclear. Whatever he was up to, foreign heads of state showed up at his Washington funeral. Kimsey championed the cause of a Knight named Michal Goleniewski. Goleniewski was a Polish intelligence officer who defected to the West in January 1961. One of the CIA's most important assets, he is credited with exposing top Soviet agents like Gordon Lonsdale (a Soviet 'deep cover' agent whose real name was Conon Trofimovich Molody); George Blake, a high-ranking member of British intelligence's MI6; and Heinz Felfe, one of Reinhard Gehlen's lieutenants inside the BND.

"Goleniewski believed that the CIA had been heavily penetrated by Soviet intelligence. He was so worried that he initially attempted to contact J. Edgar Hoover so that his defection could be handled by the FBI and not the CIA. After he was safely in the United States, Goleniewski began claiming that he was really Aleksei Nicholaevich Romanov, son of Czar Nicholas II, and rightful heir to the Imperial Throne. He also accused Henry Kissinger of working for the KGB. His supporters claimed that in 1961 he told the CIA that the Soviets had recruited Kissinger under the code name 'Bor' in 1946, when Kissinger was working for U.S. military intelligence in Oberammergau, Germany. Herman Kimsey and Cleve Backster, a lie-detector expert and the Knights' 'Chief Interrogation Officer,' took out ads to support Goleniewski. The attack on Kissinger was endorsed by another Knight, Frank Capell. Capell, a devout Catholic best known in far-right circles for his publication The Herald of Freedom, later broke with Pichel in a factional split inside the Knights."

(Dreamer of the Day, Kevin Coogan, pgs. 605-606)

Goleniewski

Strangely, Kimsey would later describe Oswald as a programmed assassin shortly before his curious death.

"In a 1975 interview, Herman Kimsey  – a CIA/Army counterintelligence agent – told researcher Hugh McDonald that 'Oswald was programmed to kill, like a medium at a séance. Then the mechanism went on the blink and Oswald became a dangerous toy without direction.' Three weeks after this interview, Kimsey himself died due to an apparent heart attack, not an uncommon occurrence among the ranks of those with heretical knowledge pertaining to the Kennedy assassination."

(The Prankster and the Conspiracy, Adam Gorightly, pgs. 182-183)

Kimsey actually died in 1971, while the McDonald book was published in 1975. Journalist Dick Russell gave some ore compelling details concerning Kimsey's claims:

"Kimsey also told McDonald that the actual JFK assassin was a European contract killer code-name 'Saul,' hired by 'a private group, but that group had strong government connections.' When McDonald set out to find Saul – which he eventually managed to do – he went through an émigré network in Europe that he called by the code name 'Blue Fox.' McDonald's description of this group is very close to the Gehlen-White Russian-Ukrainian underground – with its connections to Charles Willoughby and the CIA. Herman Kimsey, interestingly enough, was, like Willoughby, a member of the Military Affairs Committee of the Shickshinny Knights of Malta."  

(The Man Who Knew Too Much, Dick Russell, pgs. 675-676)

In the immediate wake of the assassination Knight Frank Capell would play a significant role in spreading "phase one" stories amongst the conspiratorial right.

"Frank Capell was also a source for an anti-CIA 'phase one' assassination article in the John Birch Society publication American Opinion, by yet another Hargis associate, Revilo Oliver. Oliver was not just a Bircher, but a featured speaker and award-winner at the Congress of Freedom meeting in New Orleans attended by Joseph Milteer, where plans to assassinate politicians were allegedly discussed.

"As summarized by Warren Commission counsel Jenner, Oliver's article claimed that the JFK assassination

was part of a Communist plot engineered with the help of the Central Intelligence Agency, that Lee Harvey Oswald was a communist agent trained... in a school of international criminals near Minsk, Russia, under order from Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara...

"Oliver argued that the assassination grew out of the conspiracy between Khrushchev and Kennedy to enact a 'fake "revolt"' against Castro, and replace Castro with a crypto-Communist '"agrarian reformer."' Roughly the same story was circulated at this time by John Martino and by the Minutemen.

"Questioned by the Warren Commission about the sources of his article, Oliver identified his 'research assistant,' Frank Capell, 'a private expert on Communism and Communistic information, who, I understand, has the cooperation of many former intelligence officers of the Army and former members of the FBI...' It seems clear that the Foreign Intelligence Digest network (FID), through Corso, Capell, and possibly Kimsey, enjoyed connections inside the official intelligence world. Though their claims were distorted to the point of absurdity, there may have been a germ of truth to their claims, enough to have embarrassed and possibly even blackmailed the FBI."

(Deep politics and the Murder of JFK, Peter Dale Scott, pgs. 215-216)

Frank Capell

As noted in part two of this series, Joseph Milteer was a white supremacist with ties throughout the far right underground. Shortly before the assassination he told an undercover FBI informant that Kennedy was about to be murdered with a high-powered rifle. And here he is attending a Congress of Freedom meeting in 1963 shortly before the assassination... The same meeting also attended by an even more notorious white supremacist, Revilo P. Oliver. Oliver had been a code breaker for the Army Security Agency during World War II, putting him in the netherworld of military intelligence. Apparently during this time he became convinced that the nation's capital was permeated with Communists. In 1958 he attended the meeting that established the John Birch Society, but the JBS later broke with Oliver over his rampant Antisemitism.

Congress of Freedom attendees Milteer (top) and Oliver (bottom)

The above-mentioned  Foreign Intelligence Digest was a newsletter Charles Willoughby put out for his private intelligence network, known as the International Committee for the Defense of Christian Culture (ICDCC). More information on the ICDCC, the SOSJ, and the vast role they played in creating the modern day patriot movement can be found here and here.

But let us move along now from the secret societies and consider what is possibly the strangest aspect of the assassination lore: the bizarre churches and preachers that appear throughout. I already touched upon this topic briefly in the first installment when addressing the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia (ROCOR) and its intelligence ties. The ROCOR was hardly the only church with such ties to appear amongst the personalities and organizations linked to the assassination, however.

At least one of these churches had strong ties to the SOSJ: the Church of Jesus Christ-Christian. This "ministry" was founded by Colonel William Potter Gale, a former military intelligence officer who had served under Willoughby during World War II, and steeped in Christian Identity "theology." As I addressed here, the Reverend Gale's brand of Christian Identity was particular peculiar, depicting white people as a celestial Aryan race while reducing Jews to demonic beings from outer space. Throughout the 1960s he held services for his ministry in Glendale, California in a Masonic lodge.

the "Reverend" Gale

As was noted in the third installment of this series, several individuals linked to the assassination met with Gale and even attended services at his church in the months leading up to the assassination. They included mercenary, Minuteman, and arms trafficker Loran Eugene Hall (who may have played a key role in the assassination, as noted in part one); Edgar Eugene Bradley, the West Coast representative of Dr. Carl McIntire's American Council of Christian Churches (an organization which the highly controversial "Torbitt document" linked to the assassination), who possibly had ties to the anti-Castro underground; and Fred Lee Crisman, long alleged to be a friend of Clay Shaw (who was played by Tommy Lee Jones in Oliver Stone's JFK) and the first person Mr. Shaw called after being charged with the murder of JFK by Jim Garrison. Crisman also played some type of role in the Maury Island incident, the onset of the great wave of UFO sightings in 1947, and has long been alleged to have had ties with the US intelligence community.

Hall (top) and Crisman (bottom)

But this only scratching the surface. Consider, for instance, the bizarre preacher Lee Harvey Oswald allegedly sat next to during his notorious and highly controversial trip to Mexico City in the fall of 1963.

"When Lee Harvey Oswald made his famous trip by bus to Mexico City in 1963, ostensibly to obtain a visa for Cuba, he said next to an Englishman by the name of John Howard Bowen, alias Albert Osborne. Bowen was an 'itinerant preacher' of the Baptist persuasion, an elderly gentleman who traveled frequently to Mexico, according to the Warren Commission exhibits (mostly FBI interrogation reports). When confronted by the FBI, Bowen claimed he borrowed the identity of Albert Osborne, an Englishman who was also an itinerant Baptist preacher, when investigated by the Mexican authorities at a time when he couldn't find his own identification. He claimed that Osborne was an Englishman but that he, Bowen, was born in the United States. Unfortunately, the other passengers on that fabled bus trip to Mexico City identified Bowen as an Englishman, and eventually the FBI concluded the Bowen and Osborne were one and the same. What is interesting is the fact that Bowen-Osborne was a devoted Nazi both before and during World War II, opposing America's entry into the war, and ran a fascist camp for boys in rural Tennessee until it closed down in 1942."

(Sinister Forces Book III, Peter Levenda, pg. 30)

Osborne's full name was Albert Alexander Osborne. Oswald used the name Alex as an alias regularly and used the name Osborne to order his Fair Play For Cuba Committee leaflets in the spring of 1963. According to former military intelligence officer and CIA asset Richard Case Nagell, Oswald also used Albert as a false name at times.

Osborne reportedly lived on both sides of the US/Mexico border --in the Mexican state of Oaxaca and in Laredo, Texas. Laredo is where heroin shipped by Civil Air Transport/Air America was originally smuggled into the United States at, as noted before here. Two members of the SOSJ, Charles Willoughby and Admiral Charles Cooke, were involved in establishing this network. Laredo was also reportedly the site of a UFO crash on July 7, 1948, almost exactly one year to the day from the Roswell incident.

Osborne's movements after his encounter with Oswald in September of 1963 are equally curious.

"Though there is no known sighting of Oswald and Osborne together after the bus ride, only twenty-four hours separated their departures from Mexico City in early October. On October 2, Osborne crossed back into Texas at the Laredo border and journeyed on to New Orleans. On October 3, Oswald crossed back into Texas at the Laredo border, and was in Dallas by that same afternoon.

"On October 10, Osborne showed up at the Canadian consulate in New Orleans, producing a true birth certificate (and false record of service in the Canadian armed forces) to obtain a new passport in his own name. He told Canadian officials he had just arrived by bus from his residence in Montréal and was en route to Mexico City for a vacation. Instead, he set off on a lengthy trip across the southern United States 'visiting churches and collecting religious books,' he would tell the FBI.

"Then Osborne wrote to the Knoxville Journal. A short article that appeared on November 14, 1963, is headlined: 'Bowen Leaves for Overseas.' It went on: 'John Howard Bowen, organizer of Boys Club here and missionary to the Mixteca Indians in Mexico for the past 20 years, left New York yesterday for a speaking tour in England, Spain, Portugal and Italy... Bowen was invited by evangelical groups of each country.'

"The day after the article appeared, Osborne, not Bowen, wrote to American Express in Mexico requesting that all letters to 'Bowen' be forwarded to him at their offices in New York City. Then he departed on an overseas trip, but there is no record that Osborne did any speaking that autumn of 1963. When first questioned by the FBI, he sought to conceal the fact that he had been out of the country for the three week shortly before and after the assassination. He had flown first to Scotland, then traveled some three hundred miles to Grimsby, England, to stay with his sister and visit a brother at a home for the elderly. 'This was the first time his relatives in England had seen him in about 40 years,' according to the FBI.

"After staying three days in Grimsby, Osborne left shortly before the assassination, telling his sister he was going to London. On November 22, 1963, from an English town a short distance from Grimsby, a mysterious phone call was made to a newspaper in Cambridge, about 25 minutes before the president was shot. 'The caller said only that the reporter should call the American Embassy in London for some big news and then rang off.' a CIA cable released in 1976 reports.

"On November 28, Osborne postmarked a letter from Madrid, Spain, noting that he planned to return to the United States in a week. Records show that he arrived in New York on December 5, and proceeded directly to Texas. After a considerable research, the FBI found him in Mexico in January 1964, and conducted the first of four interviews. Only at the final session in March did he admit that he was not 'Bowen,' but Osborne. The FBI while having 'established he is a con-man and an inveterate liar,' found 'no data of a subversive nature. Since no connection between Osborne and Oswald has been established, no additional investigation, re Osborne will be conducted.'

"That is unfortunate, since Osborne suspicious trail through Mexico, New Orleans, Texas, and abroad bore all the earmarks of someone who might have been able to tell us quite a bit more. He is said to have died in Texas sometime in the early 1970s. Hugh McDonald, an ex-CIA contract agent who wrote two books on the assassination, claimed to have uncovered information that Osborne was a KGB courier who operated for years in Spain, Canada, Mexico, and the southwestern United States. But as an 'itinerant preacher,' there is no ruling out that he rode a similar circuit as Billy James Hargis – or, for that matter,  David Ferrie, who set up his own branch of the Orthodox Old Catholic Church of North America. During World War II, Osborne was discovered by the FBI to of been a near-fanatical supporter of Nazi Germany."

(The Man Who Knew Too Much, Dick Russell, pgs. 485-486)

an scene from Grimsby

Strangest of all, however, are the long persistent rumors that Osborne was involved with some type of assassins school in Mexico.

"At the time of the Kennedy Assassination in 1963, there were persistent rumors that Bowen-Osborne was running a school for assassins in Mexico, somewhere in Pueblo, under the guise of a 'missionary effort.' (When Bowen was first interrogated by the FBI, he claimed that he had been ordained a minister in 1914 by the Plymouth Brethren in Trenton, New Jersey. The Plymouth Brethren is the sect which Aleister Crowley's parents belonged, and from whom he 'discovered' his true identity as the Great Beast 666.) Even the Warren Commission could not accept the testimony of Bowen-Osborne, and they were easy marks. Gradually, stories about Bowen's connections to American paramilitary organizations began to circulate, including his involvement with the Minutemen. It was Fred Crisman's purported relationship to the same paramilitary group that led to his interrogation by Jim Garrison, in 1968."

(Sinister Forces Book III, Peter Levenda, pg. 30)

The highly controversial "Torbitt document" (which is inaccurate on several levels in this researcher's opinion) made several sensation claims concerning this assassination school.

"... there were twenty-five to thirty professional assassins kept in Mexico by the espionage section of the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation; that these men were used to commit political assassinations all over North, South and Central America, the east European countries and in Russia; that these men were the absolute world's most accurate rifleman; that they sometimes took private contracts to kill in the United States; that the contact man for employment of the rifleman was a man named Bowen posing as an American Council of Christian Churches missionary in Mexico; that you could reach Bowen through the owner of the St. Anthony Hotel in Laredo, Texas...

"Albert Alexander Osborne, alias John Howard Bowen , alias J. H. Owen, a charter member and employee of the A. C. C. C., met Lee Harvey Oswald and accompanied him to Mexico City in late September 1963.

"Osborne or Bowen in 1942 organized and operated a Nazi black shirt group called the 'Campfire Council' in the country near Knoxville, Tennessee. The 'Campfire Council' was sponsored by the espionage cover group, the 'American Council of Christian Churches.' Osborne so vehemently opposed the United States war with Nazi Germany that during 1942 he tore down an American flag and stopped it into the ground. The neighbors complained of the pro-Nazi activities of Bowen and his young Fascists, even though the rural area in Tennessee where they were located was very sparsely populated..."

(NASA, Nazis & JFK, "Nomenclature of an Assassination Cabal," "William Torbitt," pgs. 108-109)

Osborne

As far as I've been able to determine there is no evidence that Osborne had any involvement with the American Council of Christian Churches or that the ACCC was even involved in the assassination. I suspect a lot of the stories floating around concerning the ACCC were a diversion to draw attention away from a most peculiar sect that we shall consider in just a moment. Osborne did seem to have ran a fascist youth camp during the 1940s, however.

Its also interesting to note that reports concerning some type of curious "school" or training center located in Mexico appear throughout conspiracy literature.

"We looked at the claim of alien abductee Whitley Strieber who said that, as a child in the 1950s, he had been taken to a 'secret school' with other small children. A claim with very little documentation to support it, until we came across other 'secret schools' in operation at the same time, including one attended by theoretical physicist Jack Sarfatti  and operated by the Sandia Corporation, a company that ran on Defense Department contracts. Then we come across a man who shared a bus ride into Mexico with Lee Harvey Oswald, a man who ran a 'secret school' in that country and who had been a Nazi supporter during World War II, running a paramilitary camp for adolescents in Tennessee. Strieber claimed his 'secret school' had two locations: one in San Antonio, at the Olmos Basin, and another in Monterrey, Mexico. Strieber had also been taken to Randolph Air Base, which was staffed with more than a hundred former Nazi scientists and medical officers under the Paperclip program, including General Hubertus Strughold: men responsible for experimentation on live human subjects at the death camps.

"Then we came across the startling episode of the Finders, a group of cultic pretension and CIA protection, with an international reach that specialize in children, shipping, some of them to a 'secret school' in Mexico. In 1987."

(Sinister Forces Book III, Peter Levenda, pg. 409)

author Whitley Strieber's most noted work

Famed theoretical physicist Jack Sarfatti would go on to become a close associate of Andrija Puharich, whom we encountered in part one and four of this series. I addressed the highly controversial Finders organization before here (the post also features a compelling rebuttal of the allegations surrounding the Finders from a reader in the comments section) A kind of school in Mexico also appears in the highly, highly controversial claims made by the notorious serial killer Henry Lee Lucas.

"Just a couple years at into his incarceration, he told his story in a book written for him by a sympathetic author. The book, entitled The Hand of Death: The Henry Lee Lucas Story, tells of Henry's indoctrination into a nationwide satanic cult. Lucas claimed that he was trained by the cult in a mobile paramilitary training camp in the Florida Everglades. His training, he said, including instruction in abduction and arson techniques, as well as in the fine art of killing, up close and personal. Henry further claimed that leaders of the camp were so impressed with his handling of a knife that he was allowed to serve as an instructor. Following his training, Henry claimed that he served the cult in various ways, including as a contract killer and as an abductor of children, whom he delivered to a ranch in Mexico near Juarez. Once there, they were used in the production of child pornography and for ritual sacrifices. Henry has said that the cult's operations were based in Texas, including trafficking in children and drugs, among other illegal pursuits."

(Programmed to Kill, David McGowan, pgs. 73-74)

Lucas

Lucas' claims concerning the Hand of Death are usually dismissed out of hand and no doubt they are seriously embellished. But students of the JFK assassination should immediately be struck by the locations he associated with the Hand of Death --southern Florida, especially around Miami and the Everglades, Texas (where he seems to have frequently operated out of Montague County, which is near Fort Worth), and Mexico. He also traveled through Louisiana more than his fair share of times.

Lucas' description of a paramilitary training camp for the Hand of Death in the Florida Everglades is usually one aspect of his story most vigorously attacked. And yet anti-Castro Cubans and their American trainers (of whom the above-mentioned Loran Eugene Hall was one) did use the Florida Everglades as a paramilitary training ground until at least the early 1960s (Henry claims to have joined the cult around 1980), thus Lucas' claim is hardly with out precedent. What's more, both drug and arms trafficking as well as sexual slavery (involving adult women) were conducted amongst the alliance of anti-Castro Cubans, Syndicate figures, Minutemen, and US intelligence assets that operated out of Florida, Texas, Louisiana and Mexico during in the time frame leading up to the Kennedy assassination, as noted before here.

Then of course there was the bizarre cult headed by drug trafficker Adolfo Constanzo in Mexico, most notably near Matamoros and Mexico City, during the late 1980s. Constanzo, who became a key figure in the Gulf Cartel around this time, was a Santeria and Palo Mayombe practitioner. He was also a Cuban-American by birth who spent a good part of his formative years in Miami. More on Constanzo can be found here, here, here and here. But I digress.

Constanzo

Let us move along to one of the truly sinister organizations linked to the assassination: the American Orthodox Catholic Church (AOCC). Several individuals, two very well known, linked to the assassination were bishops of this peculiar sect. Here's a bit about the AOCC and its ties to the Kennedy assassination:

"... the American Orthodox Catholic Church (AOCC) had its origins in Eastern Orthodoxy, which was in disarray after the Russian Revolution. In the 1960s, Bishop Carl Stanley was one of the church's leaders in the Midwest. He had participated in the consecration of Jack Martin and David Ferrie, two of the most notorious members of what New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison decided was a conspiracy of anti-Castro Cubans, right-wing zealots, intelligence agents (and others) to murder the President. Stanley himself, according to documents in the National Archives, was a convicted felon with a substantial rap sheet. He was under investigation by the FBI after the assassination, evidently because Stanley himself had reported on his relationship with Ferrie and Martin and his suspicion that the two men were involved in the killing of the President. Garrison picked up on these threads during his own investigation in 1967-68, and cast a wider net: eventually, he would be seeking to dispose wandering bishops as far afield as candidate, including one Earl Anglin James, who had consecrated the bishop who consecrated Stanley in the first place. From the aristocratic Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia to the somewhat sleazier American Orthodox Catholic Church, the ties to the Kennedy assassination were numerous and suggestive.

"One of Stanley's associates, and the man who would take over the AOCC as its 'patriarch' a few years later, was Bishop Walter Myron Propheta. Stanley was based in Kentucky at the time, and Propheta in the Bronx...

"Propheta was a hard-line anti-Communist who had supported Dewey during the campaign against President Truman. A Ukrainian by birth, he had been a priest with the Ukrainian Orthodox Church – another staunchly anti-Communist organization, since the Ukrainian people had suffered tremendously under the Moscow regime, which had tried to exterminate their language and culture along with a number of their political activists  – and had left the church to form his own congregation. The reasons for this are a little murky, and may have had more to do with politics than religion, since leaving the Church led by Bishop Bohdan and joining a suspect group that has been dismissed by most commentators as a kind of 'bishop mill' could not be seen as a particularly intelligent move.

"The key word here is 'intelligent,' for it seems that the AOCC – particularly under Propheta – was just that: a front for an intelligence organization. As suspected by Jim Garrison, the AOCC was hand in glove with a number of convert intelligence operations being run in the United States and abroad, the Church providing 'cover' in the form of authentic-looking religious documents, clerical outfits, and a widespread network of wondering bishops who for the most part were all rabidly right-wing. David Ferrie and Jack Martin were only the tip of the iceberg, for Propheta found himself involved in everything from the Biafran civil war to the Italian elections in the 1960s. One of his successors is now believed – by Italian military intelligence – to been involved in money laundering for Serbian terrorists during the latest crisis in Bosnia and Kosovo."

(Dead Names, "Simon," pgs. 61-63)

possibly Propheta

Whether or not David Ferrie was actually consecrated a bishop remains highly controversial but researcher Peter Levenda, who was personally involved with the AOCC in the late 1960s and early 1970s, has compellingly argued for Ferrie's membership in the Church. In fairness, it should also be noted that Peter Levenda is widely believed to be the above-cited "Simon," which will be prove to be quite significant in the next installment of this series.

Levenda is the only researcher to attempt an in-depth study of the AOCC, first in the initial volume of his groundbreaking Sinister Forces trilogy, and later in a series of lengthy articles published on his "Sinister Forces" blog entitled "The Bishop and the Boys." Unfortunately it seems as though Mr. Levenda has taken the series, of which there are three parts, down but it was cut and pasted in its entirety on a forum that can be found here. There are a few compelling points made in this series that need to be repeated. The first is the fact that Ferrie and Jack Martin were not the only "wandering bishops" working of Guy Banister in New Orleans in 1963.

"... At one time, there were as many as four “bishops” functioning from Guy Banister’s Camp Street office, and these included virtually all of his investigators, from David Ferrie and Jack Martin to Thomas Beckham and the lawyer Thomas Jude Baumler. Beckham was a bishop with the Universal Life Church, along with his friend Fred Lee Crisman (the man who was involved with the seminal UFO event of the 20th century, the Maury Island affair) and with Raymond Broshears, yet another minister of the Universal Life Church and later with one of the Orthodox sects with lines to Stanley, and who became a well-known gay activist in San Francisco later on. (Broshears would claim, probably falsely, to have lived with David Ferrie in New Orleans; however, it seems certain that he was at least an acquaintance of Ferrie.) In addition, Ferrie, Martin, Beckham, Broshears and Baumler all shared the same apostolic succession: that of Bishop Earl Anglin James in Canada (about whom more later) and of Bishop Carl Stanley of the American Orthodox Catholic Church."

("The Bishop and the Boys, Part II," Peter Levenda)

the Universal Life Church is one of the most notorious "bishop mills" out there

It should also be noted that the AOCC was not actually in existence at the time of the Kennedy assassination, but was founded shortly thereafter. However, several of the bishops behind the AOCC were already a part of the "wandering bishop" network at the time of the assassination.

"In the first place, the American Orthodox Catholic Church (at least, the version we are discussing) had not yet been created. That would happen less than a year later. Stanley at the time was bishop of something called the Holy Catholic Apostolic Church, as well as of the Byzantine Primitive Catholic Church, Old Catholic Church in North America. (He was joined in both of these operations by one Cyril T. Omarra, about whom the author can discover nothing so far.) Martin claimed to have been investigating Stanley 'for several private clients' during the period 1959-1966, and had ordination and consecration certificates from Stanley’s various churches dating from as early as 1960. Yet, Martin was an eager and active participant in the American Orthodox Catholic Church until his death, hardly the position of someone who held a dim view of the organization. Was his politicking against Stanley (and Ferrie) of a piece with what Propheta was doing in New York? Or was there a deeper motive involved, an attempt to divert attention away from someone or something?

"That Martin and Stanley had a falling out in 1963 is certain; Stanley’s report to the FBI that year that Martin and Ferrie were involved in a conspiracy to assassinate the President is proof positive of bad blood between them. What doesn’t make much sense is the fact that Martin was a close associate of the other bishops who, together with Stanley, formed the AOCC in 1964, after Stanley dropped the dime on Martin and Ferrie. The whole affair would begin to look like an inspired disinformation operation if it weren’t for the fact that the central characters are so … odd."

(ibid)

a document canonizing Bishop Stanley in the wake of his death, making him "Saint Stanley"

Earlier, Levenda provided some more compelling details about the intelligence connections of the AOCC as well as their linkage to the JFK assassination:

"In the same year, Walter Propheta was in New York City forming the East Coast version of the AOCC. In 1967, Propheta was involved with J. Edgar Hoover who evidently installed him as the “primate” of the American Orthodox Catholic Church at a dinner in Manhattan. (This tie between Propheta and the FBI was known to the author from Propheta’s own admission to him in 1968.) Once installed, he advised the other bishops that they had to present their credentials to him to be approved as part of the new AOCC. While the other bishops refused, Stanley eagerly raced to New York City. One wonders what “credentials” this convicted felon offered to Propheta and the FBI, for a month later he was dead ... a few weeks after the controversial death of his bishop, David Ferrie.

"Ferrie had been introduced to Stanley by Jack Martin, an investigator with Guy Banister’s detective agency in New Orleans. Martin has been portrayed as a hopeless drunk in Oliver Stone’s film of the assassination, and has been given short-shrift in other studies of the New Orleans connection. Martin himself ratted out Banister, Stanley and Ferrie to the FBI after the assassination when it became clear that District Attorney Jim Garrison was investigating the case. We should not take this all at face value, however, for Martin – even though he pretended to be investigating Carl Stanley – remained a bishop of the American Orthodox Catholic Church for many years after the assassination and until the day he died, even participating in the consecration of Thomas Jude Baumler – a self-admitted fascist and attorney who also worked briefly as an investigator for Guy Banister and as a New Orleans politician in his own right – as late as 1974.

"Martin first attempted to have David Ferrie consecrated by another bishop on the East Coast, but the bishop felt that there was something “unholy” about Ferrie, and he declined. Ferrie then went on to Stanley where he was more successful. This occurs in the three year period before the Kennedy assassination."

(ibid)

Ferrie

More on David Ferrie's possible "unholiness" will be discussed in the next installment. For now, consider a few more details Levenda provides concerning the deaths of Stanley and Ferrie as well as possible links to the FBI.

"Carl Stanley met with Propheta in New York City in early February, 1967 according to information provided to the author by another bishop. David Ferrie died in his New Orleans apartment on February 22, 1967. Ferrie’s associate, Eladio del Valle (an anti-Castro Cuban) was murdered in a parking lot in Miami on the same day. The following day – Feb 23, 1967 – Carl Stanley met with the FBI according to an FBI teletype dated March 9, 1967. (Was this on orders or advice by Bishop Propheta, the FBI-installed "Primate"?) According to the available documentation, he used that opportunity to further slander David Ferrie and Jack Martin. Ferrie, of course, had died just the day before. Clay Shaw was arrested on March 1, 1967. Carl Stanley then died of an apparent heart attack on March 8, 1967 in Louisville, Kentucky."

(ibid) 

J. Edgar Hoover: wandering bishop?

Just what kind of arrangement did the FBI and AOCC have? Did the FBI instruct Propheta to convince Stanley to tell the Bureau what he really knew about the assassination and the role Martin and Ferrie played in it? And was the FBI disturbed by what Stanley knew?

The FBI also seems to have performed services for the AOCC. Levenda goes on to report that Jack Martin was able to furnish FBI files for applicants into "Holy Orders."

"My informant goes on to insist that Martin could be relied upon to furnish FBI files on 'future applicants for Holy Orders', a strange capability for a hopeless drunk. It is widely rumored that Martin had a source at FBI headquarters in New Orleans who provided him these files, but he also made it known that he was an investigator for the District Attorney’s office – something of which the DA was presumably not aware! Yet he had an income of some kind, for he was known to travel extensively throughout the United States for years on one errand or another involving the bishops, a true 'wanderer'."

("The Bishop and the Boys, Part III," Peter Levenda)

What were these "Holy Orders" and why were they important enough to warrant FBI background checks? And how did Jack S. Martin, a figure often portrayed as a hopeless drunk, end up providing this service? Earlier Levenda had given some incredible background details concerning the highly mysterious figure of Martin:

"Jack Martin is a pretty common name, so perhaps we should not be surprised to see a Special Agent Jack S. Martin appearing on Project Blue Book documents dating back to 1949, years before Edward Suggs changed his name (as far as we know). This particular Jack S. Martin was in California at the same time as our Ed Suggs, but was working for the OSI, or Office of Special Investigations, a department of the US Air Force. This is shown by OSI documents from October 1949 in which S/A Jack S. Martin was investigating UFO sightings in northern California by an Edward W. Gurband, a Roy Oliver Neely, and a Reverend Curtis Daniels that had taken place on August 1, 1949 in the San Francisco area. Our Jack S. Martin, however, is not known to have changed his name that early and, besides, there is no evidence at all that he ever worked for the Air Force. However, just to be devil’s advocate for a moment, there was no US Air Force during World War II; it was known as the Army Air Corps then, so it is possible – just barely possible – that Suggs/Martin did work for the Army Air Corps as an enlisted man or even as military police, but I have been unable to find Suggs’ military record to confirm or deny this possibility. I just leave it here as an unresolved issue. It would be amusing (if not a little unnerving) to discover that both Guy Banister and Jack Martin were investigating UFOs for the government at the same time, though!

"Getting back to Suggs, however, we find that he was passing himself off as variously an FBI agent or a CIA agent in the late 1950s and early 1960s, before the Kennedy assassination. An alcoholic, he wound up in a mental ward at New Orleans’ Charity Hospital in January of 1957, with 'sociopathic personality disorder, antisocial type'. All during this time he was married to the long-suffering Paula Martin and even had a child, but he was unable to hold down a job for any length of time.

"This is a familiar pattern in the Kennedy assassination case. Lee Harvey Oswald had the same track record as a married man with children, unable to hold down a job, and who had been under psychiatric observation (at least, in the Soviet Union). If we are to believe the record, both men had delusions of grandeur and could be considered antisocial sociopaths. And, of course, both had military service and both wound up in New Orleans at the same time, working out of Guy Banister’s Camp Street office. Oswald, however, was not an alcoholic nor was he one of Carl Stanley’s bishops.

"As another aside, both Ferrie and Martin were involved in unorthodox medical practices and experimentation. Ferrie’s obsession with curing cancer is well-known and documented, as well as his practice of hypnosis, and Martin had an on-again, off-again fascination with various forms of medicine, homeopathy, chiropracty, hypnosis, and the like.

"In 1960, Martin was interviewed by the FBI on charges that he was impersonating an FBI agent. Martin seemed to have offered the Feds a deal in which he would reveal that one Carl J. Stanley of Kentucky was running an illegal operation by furnishing false ordination certificates and other worthless paper. The FBI interviewed Stanley himself, and came away with the opinion that both Stanley and Martin were fruitcakes.

"There it would have ended had it not been for the events in Dallas of November, 1963 and a series of bizarre phone calls that took place between Stanley and the FBI, and Martin and the FBI in the hours after the Kennedy assassination."

(ibid)

Martin

Thus, Martin may also have been chasing UFOs, but this is highly debatable. As noted in the second installment of this series, Edwards Suggs (Martin's real name) may not have been the only one using the name Jack S. Martin in New Orleans in the early 1960s. Sometime CIA asset Pierce Lafitte, one of the two individuals H.P. Alberelli Jr. would finger for Frank Olson's murder (of which more information can be found on here and here) in his groundbreaking A Terrible Mistake: The Murder of Frank Olson and the CIA'S Cold War Experiments, also used the name Jack S. Martin in New Orleans during this time period. Alberelli also dropped an interesting reference to Martin/Suggs' stay in Charity Hospital during his most recent work.

 "... it should be noted that Jack S. Martin had in early 1957 spent time in the psychiatric ward at New Orleans' Charity Hospital, where some patients from the East Louisiana State Hospital were transferred after they had been used as subjects in LSD and other experiments."

(A Secret Order, H.P. Albarelli Jr., pg. 82)

As noted in part four of this series, East Louisiana State Hospital was used for CIA "behavioral modification" experiments under the auspices of Projects MKULTRA and/or Artichoke. And that brings us to Martin's interest in hypnotism. As noted above, this was an interest that Martin shared with David Ferrie, a man whom compelling evidence has emerged over the years that Martin greatly despised. Still, the relationship of these two men may well have been far more complex than many researchers have imagined, as Levenda alluded to above.

Which begs the question, is it possible either man could have been involved in some aspect of the CIA's "medical" experiments? After all, both men appear to be hypnotists with ties to the US intelligence community operating out of an area (New Orleans) that was engaged in behavior modification experiments during the same time frame. In this next and hopefully final installment of this series I shall consider this possibility. Stay tuned.