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In a more serious episode, we talk to author and journalist Nick Bryant about his 2009 book “The Franklin Scandal: A Story of Powerbrokers, Child Abuse & Betrayal.” We’ve mentioned the Franklin Credit Union scandal in passing on the show before, but it begins with the collapse of the Franklin Credit Union in Omaha, Nebraska in 1988 due to rampant corruption and embezzlement of its manager, Lawrence E. King, Jr. Soon after, King was accused, along with GOP lobbyist Craig Spence, of orchestrating a massive child prostitution ring, shuttling minors between Omaha and D.C., and using their solicitation to blackmail high ranking political figures. Bryant’s work examines the evidence behind this, and we discuss the scandal, the victims, the cover up, intelligence agency connections of its perpetrators, and the crucial links between intelligence-led sexual political blackmail operations of the past with the Epstein case today.

Follow Nick on Twitter here: @nick__bryant

Find more info, Nick’s book and Nick’s blog on his website here: nickbryantnyc.com

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Comments

TzzZach

Overall pretty good, will mentioning that McMartin is a hoax is not true. Check out Ed Opperman episode on YouTube about the tunnels under the school that they found later. Also just obvious stuff about the amount of kids with STIs

Anonymous

People are shitting their pants over the wiki part but it's not hard to imagine half a dozen dorks constantly editing the page to make it sound like a hoax just because they're misguided, like that's easily the most believable part of this episode regardless of how you feel about Wikipedia as an institution

William Beamish

bring a bigfoot expert on plz, I want to learn about the sheep and smoke bigfoots

Anonymous

Wow, this one was incredibly boring and tedious

I am become reply guy

Why is it so hard to find anything about this story? Is there reading list out there?

Tomaz

The wikipedia on the incident detailing it as a hoax might be a good insight into the prevailing orthodoxy on this one

Anonymous

amazing how many chapo listeners have issues about wide ranging conspiracies in society. oh is wikipedia too far for you!? boo fucking hoo grow the fuck up

Anonymous

Wikipedia needs you! If any of you make an account and would like help getting started, write something on my talk page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:MainlyTwelve I am a long time editor.

Demented Avenger

Opperman sometimes does good work, but he has a lot of law enforcement sources and defers to them. These guys don't want to admit they're wrong about anything, much like many of us. The "tunnels" under the school was just part of a foundation of a building that had been there before the preschool was built. McMartin was a hoax.

SF

Great guest, great ep. And as ever, no Chapo interview episode is complete without a bunch of listeners getting mad about it in the Patreon comments.

Woke Batou

Chapo doing god's work

ClownBabee24

Ive been waiting for Trueanon to cover this, but i guess chapo will do lol

Eric Gilbertson

Wondering if why this guy was ground down so hard vs people investigating Epstein is the general lack of state capacity now. Everything is the same only worse, even for the people running the official pedophile rings.

TCE

He wrote a book for an independent publisher in the late 2000s - when the internet was smaller, sexual assault / child abuse wasn't as prominent in the media, and the events he was talking about were decades in the past and forgotten about - while the Epstein investigators, especially Julie Brown, wrote for a major newspaper that backed her, while Epstein was still at large (making it "news" instead of "history or w/e), in the middle of the #MeToo movement meaning there was a lot of media interest in stories like this, and he had very public ties to people like Trump and Clinton, which the general public was more interested in. Pictures helped too. People love pictures. There were dozens of pictures of Epstein standing next to famous people at parties, including the then President. Meanwhile you have to get to like the 10th page of Google to even find what Lawrence King looks like, never mind photos of him with someone like a President

Hector Jaime

That the #metoo movement didn’t help Epstein survivors isn’t mind boggling given that Bill Clinton was in the picture.