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THE FRANKLIN COVER-UP -- CHILD ABUSE, SATANISM, AND MURDER IN NEBRASKA |
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CHAPTER 19: FOUR YEARS LATER -- WHERE ARE THEY NOW? So now, four years later, what has happened to some of the key figures in the Franklin case? My good friend, William Colby, the chief behind-the-scenes architect of the Franklin investigation, is dead. Franklin Credit Union boss Larry King has served five years in prison and is about to be released. Alisha Owen was convicted of perjury on June 21, 1991. In February, she went to prison to begin a 15-year sentence. This is notwithstanding the fact that the Nebraska Supreme Court expunged the report of the Douglas County Grand Jury from all official records, because the report violated all laws relating to such proceedings. This Grand Jury had indicted Alisha in the first place, claiming that the children's charges of abuse were a "carefully crafted hoax." The Omaha World Herald, however, had extolled the Douglas County Grand Jury report, complaining that the Supreme Court had condemned it. At my own expense, I have continued to provide legal assistance to her in the appeals process during the last four years. But, I did not represent Alisha at her original, hasty 30-day trial, and the problem in defending her subsequently is, that if things were done wrong at the trial level, either by the defendant, or by the defendant's lawyer, it is difficult, if not impossible, to correct that problem at the appeals level. The only way to do that, is to prove to the court that the defendant did not receive adequate assistance by counsel during the trial -- otherwise the appeals attorney is limited to the record created during the original trial. Troy Boner came under such onerous pressure from the FBI, that he recanted all that he had told the State Senate's Franklin investigator, Gary Caradori. This recantation was the key factor in the Douglas Grand Jury's "findings" that all the children had lied. In 1993, Troy engaged me as his lawyer. Before he did so, however, I asked him to write an affidavit, telling the story as he actually knew it to have actually happened. In this affidavit (printed in the next chapter), he reasserted his original story, which he had also told the Yorkshire TV crew. He has now dropped from sight, no doubt terrified about the threats that the FBI and others delivered to him, were he to tell the truth. Paul Bonacci has matured, fallen in love, and is a devoutly religious young man. He is now a youth counselor, working to protect young children from the experiences he suffered. The civil rights lawsuit I filed on behalf of Paul still continues. It has been an incredibly costly and painful effort for both of us. I will try to outline a few of the facts which are on the public record with respect to that lawsuit. First, as part of our discovery process in the suit, we were able to locate a vast store of pornographic materials, which were in the possession of the Douglas County Court. These had been held by Peter Citron before Citron was arrested. However, the court imposed such strict rules on our being allowed to see the material, that we were able to review only 1% of the material -- before the court ordered it destroyed! The material consisted of thousands of hours of tapes, magazine articles, and related pornographic materials. The court ruled that Paul was not to be allowed to see any of the materials. This restriction was extremely damaging to us, because Paul was and is the one person who can, and will, identify the children and the others in the films -- a fact the court itself acknowledged! The more we began to pour over Citron's materials, the more we discovered that huge amounts of them, as identified in the official court inventory provided to us, were missing. So, we immediately went to court -- which took additional time -- to hold hearings and to subpoena officials, to try to locate the missing materials and find out how these materials could disappear, despite strenuous security measures. The official in control of the materials simply declaimed: "We admit there are huge amounts of pornographic materials missing, but we are not the ones who hid or destroyed or took them, and we do not know who did." Additionally, I could only view the materials in the presence of guards and of the Clerk of the Federal Court, at his convenience, and behind security doors, and with notice given to all other attorneys in the case to be present if they so desired. All this security was, as I was told, for the protection of the pornographers involved -- which seems strange, even in this bizarre case. Under the terms and within the time frame the court allowed, it was impossible to ever look at more than a fraction of the materials. Now, incredibly, the court has ordered the materials destroyed. Arrayed against me in this civil rights lawsuit on behalf of Paul Bonacci are lawyers from across the United States, from a dozen or so of the highest priced law firms in the country . One of them is Ed Warin, a former United States Attorney from Nebraska during the time much of the Franklin matters were occurring, who represents Alan Baer. The reality I, and particularly Paul Bonacci, must face in this lawsuit is this: These defendants have unlimited money, power, and resources. Paul has no resources and I have limited time and resources and a family to support and a living to earn. For example, take the Deposition of Paul Bonacci, which was given in nine days spread out over the period of a year. I have often told Paul, after the deposition and the legal assault on his credibility by the battery of high-priced lawyers assembled against him: "Paul, there was truly an angel on your shoulder during these continuing days of depositions. I do not know of a single person who could have stood up to the questioning that you were put through and survived. If I had any doubts about your story before the depositions, I absolutely have no doubts now that you were and are telling the truth, and are possibly the single most important person in America who can document some horrible acts by some of our top government officials and government agencies. And though your particular case may not produce anything financial for you, the information you have laid out will one day be the starting point for major investigations of certain government agencies and their practices which have been concealed from the American people. You Paul Bonacci, are the living history book, for example, for a program called 'Monarch' and someday the American people must and will have access to that story." The more than 2,000 pages of questioning of Paul Bonacci are today secret. Matters only hinted at in this book are developed in detail there. Senator Loran Schmit was, as chairman of the State Legislature's special committee investigating Franklin, a pillar of courage, without whom little or none of the truth would ever have emerged. The forces involved in the Franklin cover-up made sure he lost his 1992 race for the Senate, after having served for 24 years. They also bankrupted him through phony lawsuits. With my help, he defeated all these legal assaults, but the suits, along with the incessant attacks by the World Herald, took a toll. Senator Schmit now works as a consultant in Lincoln. Alan Baer paid a fortune to his attorneys and managed to get his charge reduced from felonies to a single misdemeanor for which he had to pay a $500 fine. Alan Baer has now become the major promoter for the gambling industry in Nebraska. In 1996, Baer and gambling syndicate supporters spent millions of dollars to win a position on the ballot for a proposal that would have given the gambling syndicates power to allow any type of casinos or gambling enterprises into the state that they would choose; and power to regulate the new casino operations. As two former state senators, Loran Schmit and myself took out full-page ads in the World Herald denouncing the plan, and attacked Baer by name. On Friday, October 25, 1996, the gambling syndicates had made arrangements to appear before Federal Judge Kopf, who had sentenced Larry King, to obtain a federal court order to place the gambling referendum on the ballot November 5, 1996. Only a week before, I had put out a press release in which I publicly expressed my fear that the gambling syndicates would be successful in getting their proposal on the ballot, since many of the personalities involved in the syndicate, had also been involved, and protected, in the Franklin case. The release may be one reason why, when on Oct. 25, the syndicate went to get its expected order from Judge Kopf, he was nowhere to be found! It turns out he had checked himself into Bryan Memorial Hospital, with what was claimed to be a possible heart attack. When all deadlines for signing the order had passed, Judge Kopf remarkably recovered and was released from the hospital to resume his duties on the bench. U.S. Federal Magistrate Richard G. Kopf, as predicted in the first edition, leapfrogged ahead of others to win appointment as a federal judge by President George Bush, shortly after Kopf's sentencing of Larry King. U.S. Assistant Attorney Thomas D. Thalken, the federal prosecutor on top of the Franklin case, who had himself been named by investigator Gary Caradori's informants as being involved in pornography, moved ahead of five other candidates, to be appointed in October 1992 to replace Kopf as the new U.S. Federal Magistrate. Gerald Moran, Douglas County Prosecutor, also moved ahead of a host of others and was appointed a District Judge in Douglas County. His assistant, Robert Sigler, who had been described by Paul Bonacci as being in the middle of the Franklin affair, took over Moran's job of prosecuting Franklin-related victim-witnesses, particularly Alisha Owen. Omaha FBI head Nick O'Hara, who, as the saying went in Omaha, was closer to Omaha Police Chief Bob Wadman than "nineteen is to twenty," moved to Washington to become the head of Counter Terrorism for the FBI, and then onto Minnesota, to head up the state's Commission on Crime.
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