Category: Flotsam-and-Jetsam

https://youtu.be/mLxYaalMlVA

The downfall of the Billionaire Boys Club, an exclusive group of mostly wealthy Beverly Hills and Greater Los Angeles men who followed a charismatic Joe Hunt. These men lavishly spent their new found fortunes in style in parties and luxury cars and just living the good life. A man of very modest beginnings, Joe was not above murder and kidnapping stay in the big leagues to keep this investment firm afloat when the group’s short-lived fortunes were dwindling from their euphoric successes in 1984. The Billionaire Boys Club (BBC) was an investment-and-social club organized by Joseph Henry Gamsky, also known as “Joe Hunt”, in southern California in 1983. It was originally simply named “BBC”; the initials of a business named the Bombay Bicycle Club, a restaurant Gamsky had frequented in his earlier years while growing up in Chicago. The club enticed the sons of wealthy families from the Harvard School for Boys (now Harvard-Westlake School) in the Los Angeles area with get-rich-quick schemes. Given their inexperience and difficulty proving themselves in legitimate businesses, an organization like the BBC proved attractive to these boys. Due to the reputation of the organization being composed of young, inexperienced boys from moneyed families, it was jokingly referred to as the “Billionaire Boys’ Club”. During his high school years, Gamsky and his brother were high-profile members of the Harvard School debate team. However, Gamsky was thrown out of the USC Summer Debate Institute in 1975 after admitting he fabricated evidence. The story was recounted in the 1987 movie Billionaire Boys Club. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeal agreed to hear his appeal on July 1, 2014. The organization was run as a Ponzi scheme, and money contributed by investors was spent on supporting lavish lifestyles for young members of the club. When funds ran short in 1984, Hunt and other club members turned to murder, and at least two people were killed as Hunt tried to raise more money. When authorities began to investigate the murders, Dean Karny, the club’s second-in-command, and Hunt’s best friend turned state’s evidence in return for immunity from prosecution. Hunt and club-security director Jim Pittman were charged with the murder of Ron Levin, a con artist who had allegedly swindled the BBC out of over $4 million. Hunt, Pittman, club member Arben Dosti, and Reza Eslaminia were charged with the murder of Hedayat Eslaminia, Reza’s father, allegedly to acquire his fortune which was reputed to be $35 million. In 1987, Hunt was found guilty of the 1984 murder of Ron Levin and sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. Pittman had two trials, and both ended in hung juries. He later pleaded guilty to being an accessory after the fact and was sentenced to 3 1/2 years in prison. After his release, he admitted in an interview to have participated in the murder, knowing he could not be re-tried due to the restriction on double jeopardy. Dosti and Reza Eslaminia were later convicted of murdering Hedayat Eslaminia and sentenced to life imprisonment without parole. Hunt acted as his own attorney during his trial for the Eslaminia murder and contended that star witness Karny had killed Eslaminia. The result was a hung jury, 8–4, in favor of Hunt’s acquittal. Joe Hunt is the only person in California’s legal history to represent himself in a capital case and not receive the death penalty. The convictions of Dosti and Reza Eslaminia were later overturned. Hunt remained in prison for the Levin murder but maintained his innocence.

For those who consider Vincent Bugliosi’s Helter Skelter 1974 book about Charles Manson, the murders he ordered, and ensuing trial to be canon, Tom O’Neill’s new book Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixtiest History of the Sixties suggests a rift in the fabric of the universe as we know it. The product of some 20 years of exhaustive, obsessive research, Chaos suggests that the case made to the court by Bugliosi, who prosecuted the case before he wrote the definitive book about it, was fraudulent and that the entire “Helter Skelter” motive, which stated that Manson attempted to kick off a race war via the Tate-LaBianca murders of 1969, does not hold up to scrutiny in light of unearthed evidence. For one thing, according to O’Neill’s report, the relationship between Manson and record producer Terry Melcher (a previous resident of the house on Cielo Drive where Sharon Tate, Jay Sebring, Wojciech Frykowski, Abigail Folger, and Steven Parent were murdered), was more involved than it was conveyed during the trial—O’Neill says he found notes from two witness interviews that placed Melcher in the presence of Manson after the murders. This information was suppressed from the trial because, O’Neill suggests, it did not square with another part of Bugliosi’s suggested motive: Manson ordered murders to scare Melcher, who had refused to record the cult leader’s music.

READ MORE: https://jezebel.com/what-you-think-you-know-about-the-manson-family-murders-1835688049

After one of the series’ gracefully quicker hits, Too Old to Die Young finds police officer turned hitman Martin Jones (Miles Teller) and his handler Viggo (John Hawkes) driving down a California highway in the dead of night. The two men are silent, as is the road ahead of and behind them. The only sound that director Nicolas Winding Refn allows to infiltrate the scene is the angry voice of a radio show host complaining about “clowns… on the sidelines” who are the “white noise background for the collapse of the American empire.”

Listed below is the reported price of contract killings paid out to the hitmen by organized crime groups and individuals. The prices of the hit are collected from publicly available news reports, academic studies and other public sources.

Click on the dollar figure to see the story behind how the hitman was hired and other information.

LINK: https://www.havocscope.com/black-market-prices/contract-killing/

From 2001 to 2004 I was an identity thief and carder (credit card fraud). I primarily used hacked credit cards to buy goods that I’d resell for massive profits.

I started by selling fake IDs at college. I dropped out because I hated school and was making too much money to stay. I built up a small network of resellers at my school and others. When I found carding one of my resellers took over my ID business. Later he worked for me with the fraud stuff, eventually leading to my capture (more about that later). By the end I was printing my own credit cards and using them at retail stores to buy laptops, gift cards, etc which I resold on eBay.

I did a lot of other related crime too. I hacked a number of sites for their credit card databases. I sold my fake IDs and credit cards online. I was very active in carding / fraud forums, such as ShadowCrew (site taken down by Operation Firewall). I was working on getting into ATM skimming when I was caught. I had bought some electronics kits with the intention of buying an ATM and rigging it to capture data.

I was caught in December 2004. I had gone to a Best Buy with the associate mentioned above to buy a laptop. The manager figured out something was up. Had I been alone I would have talked my way out but my “friend” wasn’t a good social engineer like I was. He was sweating, shifting around, generally doing everything you shouldn’t do in that situation. Eventually the manager walked to the front of the store with the fake credit card and ID, leaving us behind. We booked it. The police ended up running his photo on the cable news network, someone turned him in and he turned me in.

After getting caught I worked with the secret service for 2 years. I was the biggest bust they had seen in western NY and they wanted to do an op investigating the online underground. They knew almost nothing. I taught them how the online underground economy worked, techniques to investigate / track / find targets, “hacker” terminology, etc.

I ended up getting time served (~2 weeks while waiting for bail), 3 years probation, and $210k restitution.

My website has some links to interviews and talks I’ve done. I do all my interviews and conference talks for free to help make up for what I did.

Go ahead, AMA. I’ve yet to find an on topic question I wouldn’t answer.

Watch The Lookout on ABC tonight, 10pm ET, to see an interview with me about skimming.

I will be answering questions off and on until midnight.

EDIT: Thanks for the questions, time for bed.

LINK: https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1laau9/iama_former_credit_card_fraudster_identity_thief/

“You likely heard about the murders. This book is what happened before and after them along California’s beaches and bluffs, San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury, the redwoods, Topanga Canyon, Beverly Hills, the Santa Susana Mountains, and the outback of the Mojave Desert. It’s about the Charles Manson I perceived, and a gathering of people preparing to survive either a revolution, or the static institutions that were systematically trading all of our vital necessities for money.” — Lynette Fromme, 2018- Goodreads

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In The Shadow Over Santa Susana, Adam Gorightly takes his readers on a black magic carpet ride from the Hollywood “Beautiful People” scene of the late 60’s through to the vast desert landscapes of a Death Valley gone mad—with all the love-ins and creepy-crawls that happened along the way. Buy this book and blow your mind! – Goodreads

 

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On August 10, 1977, the NYPD arrested David Berkowitz for the “Son of Sam” murders that had terrorized New York City for more than 13 months. Berkowitz confessed to being a lone murderer — one who had carried out eight senseless shooting with a .44 caliber Bulldog revolver. The case was officially closed. Journalist Maury Terry was suspicious of Berkowitz’s confession, convinced as he gathered corroborating evidence throughout the years, that Berkowitz did not act alone. In this investigative story, first published in 1987, Terry details the chilling events, proving that Berkowitz was an affiliate of — and triggerman for — a Satanic cult known as the Process Church of the Final Judgment, a far-reaching organization that is connected to other ritual slayings across the country. Updated wtih Berkowitz’s recent confirmations from his prison cell, Terry untangles the web of information and shocking extent of the Process Church’s activities. Includes black-and-white photographs. – Goodreads

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Review from Thoma Ligoti Online

Hi All –

Long time lurker, first time poster. I just wanted to say that I’ve recently finished Sinister Forces, an absolutely marvelous trilogy of history, cultural criticism, and metaphysics by the curious author Peter Levenda. It’s a book which reads like how it is – an enthusiastic, well-employed, world-traveling man spent 25 years researching a 2000 page masterwork all about the American government’s role in mind control, the influence of religion and the occult on mind control, and how the bizarre antics of serial killers, shamans, and other fringe elements fit into one horrifying larger picture. It’s long, sloppy, dense, fantastic, and addictively readable. Oh, and there are also some very significant detours into quantum psychology.

It’s a bit heavy going at first, with isolated strands leaping in and out of a patchwork narrative of what feels like ALL OF WRITTEN HUMAN HISTORY, but by the third volume you’re grateful for the information overload, as it really does all tie together. Written in a style somewhere between Lovecraft and The Economist, the books feel better-written and more imaginative than most works of fiction; Norman Mailer, in the introduction to the first volume of the series, asserts that Sinister Forces supplies an endless source of inspiration for spy novels and other such things, which is perhaps an ideal way to approach the material. I think we’re all fairly intelligent people here who understand that the American government (and the related military-industrial complex) has embroiled itself in all manner of utterly unethical, immoral enterprises, so while individual revelations will no doubt shock the reader, the political landscape should be relatively familiar; but, if you approach the book perhaps as it ought to be approached, less like a history lesson and more like an intricately designed entry point to a new lens through which we can view civilization, then the real joys of the work come through. The world is a frightening, interconnected world where “coincidence” is not mere coincidence and evil is all around us, operating on levels beyond the comprehension of those supposedly in charge.

The focus of Sinister Forces is difficult to explain; it’s not an especially “professional” book, but it is rather rich, intelligent, and idiosyncratic. Levenda begins by tracing the founding of America to the white cultists who settled there, and those before them, such as the Arawaks, and their various occult interests. We also examine strange burial mounds in haunted Kentucky, from ancient peoples who, by all accounting, appear to predate the natives whom the whites had met centuries later. We then dive into the records of MKULTRA, ARTICHOKE, Operation Paperclip, Wandering Bishops, Jonestown, the OTO, Aleister Crowley, Frank Olson, the Manson Murders, the Kennedy assassinations (Jack and Bobby both!), and much, much, much, much, much more. There’s also some nonsense about UFOs – well, maybe not nonsense, but it doesn’t seem to fit with the rest of the book, except when we start discussing disinformation campaigns. Still, it’s a minor complaint.

Levenda’s material has enough power as an ostensibly factual resource, although little errors here and there undermine its authority. I’m a film nerd who works in the film industry, so when someone gets a bit of film trivia wrong, I notice, and while it’s hardly that important to remember that, say, William Peter Blatty, and not William Friedkin, directed Exorcist III (Jeffery Dahmer’s favorite movie), or that, despite rumors to the contrary, Anton LaVey had nothing to do with Rosemary’s Baby, the sloppiness evinced over even a minor detail makes it difficult to buy some of the other amazing assertions dropped here and there. TrineDay, the publisher, is a small, overworked house who no doubt have to strain to publish anything, let alone meticulously fact check a 2000 page masterwork, but the books deserve better.

As it stands, however, even if we cannot trust completely the factual rigor of Sinister Forces, so much of its individual bits are true, and its bibliography is so thoughtfully enormous, that it has tremendous value still – and especially on the level of, as Mailer suggests, a fountain of ideas for fictional explorations of similar ideas. And as the books wind down from an extended history lesson to a question of non-local activity on the quantum level and what this might have to do with psychology and trance states, it’s best to let go of the handlebars and let Levenda take you on one hell of a ride. You also begin to appreciate how Levenda constructs what winds up being a remarkably coherent and plausible argument: by barraging you with inter-related factual narratives until you are adrift, until he throws you a line and reels you back into familiar waters.

Or something.

In summation, the Sinister Forces trilogy, despite some quibbles over length, organization, and a little sloppiness (which can be chalked up to limited resources and a not the integrity of Peter Levenda), is pretty dang great. Highly recommended for the adventurous, patient reader.

Levenda’s previous books comprise the equally fascinating Unholy Alliance (a theatrical but well-researched survey of the occult aspect of Nazism) and the Simon Necronomicon (unread by me).