I’m starting by serializing the first three chapters of City of Lies, which is 95% complete, but it’s a rabbit hole I was pushed down.
City of Lies: A Street Hustler’s Memoir follows Bruce, who cruised downtown Omaha when “The Franklin Scandal” played out, in the late 1980s. The events of that time have been twice chronicled in books. John DeCamp titled his The Franklin Cover-Up.
Nick Bryant, an investigative journalist who wrote the definitive book, The Franklin Scandal, spent seven years researching the events to prove sex trafficking in Omaha was no fiction. Bruce, who lived through it, knows what happened has nothing to do with conspiracy or tall tales by teenagers.
Bruce contacted me after I wrote an article on Medium summarizing how the Jeffrey Epstein crimes were similar to what happened in Omaha in the 1980s, long before “sex trafficking” had become a household word.
Because it keeps happening, the story remains sadly relevant.
Bryant continues to investigate sex trafficking. He was the one who found Jeffrey Epstein’s black book and the “Lolita Express” flight manifest, which listed the names of Donald Trump and Bill Clinton as two of Epstein’s island guests.
City of Lies: A Street Hustler’s Memoir
“America … is a society that pays great lip service to children as its most precious resource, but, in actuality, it is unwilling to put its money where its mouth is concerning their plight.”
–Nick Bryant, The Franklin Scandal: A Story of Powerbrokers, Child Abuse & Betrayal
“All things are subject to interpretation and whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth.”
–Frederich Nietzsche
Introduction: The Darkest Looking Glass
When Lewis Carroll wrote Alice in Wonderland in 1865, he invented an enduring character in ten-year-old Alice. She was living an ordinary life until she met an enormous, frazzled white rabbit. He was such an intriguing creature, that she followed him down his rabbit hole, where she would fall “through the looking glass” into a kingdom of illusions. The creatures she met there tempted her with taboo food, drink, and drugs.1
Before his tenth birthday, “Bruce” began his fall into a kingdom of pimps, pedophiles, and hustlers on the streets of Omaha, Nebraska. He met capricious, evil men in the dark corridors of the looking glass. Some were influential citizens running the city. Like many sex abuse victims, he stayed quiet.
When I first read about the Omaha allegations of sex abuse, trafficking, and satanism in 1988-1991, I filed the information away as disturbing but unlikely. Then I watched a Netflix documentary called Who Took Johnny, and the rabbit hole opened wide.2
The victims’ stories struck me as bizarre but detailed and consistent. A bevy of experienced social workers bolstered my observation, stating they believed Omaha’s kids were describing real abuse. As a true crime fan who has read hundreds of accounts of child abductions, I sensed the Johnny Gosch abduction (which remains unsolved) was the work of a pedophile or ring of pedophiles.
After Jeffrey Epstein was arrested, I opened Nick Bryant’s book, The Franklin Scandal: A Story of Powerbrokers, Child Abuse, and Betrayal. I’d read John DeCamp’s first-person account, The Franklin Cover-up, years earlier.3,4
The central figure in the Franklin story was Lawrence E. (Larry) King, Jr. He and several associates were implicated in sex trafficking but after a lengthy legislative investigation, the story fizzled. King spent ten years in federal prison on fraud charges, a party buddy of King’s went to prison on separate child molestation charges, and two men got small fines with misdemeanor convictions. Five hundred dollars wasn’t much for multi-millionaire Alan Baer, one of Bruce’s clients.
Bruce contacted me and asked if I would consider writing about his life as a street hustler. He wanted to talk about growing up in Boys Town in the shadow of the Franklin scandal. Bruce assured me he had a front-row seat to the seedy side of Omaha life.
We can’t erase the evil acts of Epstein, Maxwell, Jimmy Savile, and a disturbing cohort of wealthy, high-profile pedophiles, but we can listen to their victims. Sex abuse by priests, political officials, and cult leaders can only end with our willingness to expose them. As much as I wanted to remain on the surface, I got pulled in as I began to read more about Franklin and realized it still matters—partly because it is still treated as a wild “hoax” instead of a series of actual sex crimes against real people like Bruce.
Bruce’s tale adds another piece to the Franklin jigsaw puzzle.
In 1991, headlines from the Omaha World-Herald triumphantly announced that dozens of victim testimonies were part of a “carefully crafted hoax.” Bruce read the article, saw it was bogus, and set the newspaper aside. He knew one of the accused personally and several of the witnesses. Watching what they endured at the hands of the justice system, he concluded coming forward wasn’t in his best interests. If individuals with first-hand knowledge, such as Alisha Owen, were being publicly discredited and thrown in jail, he doubted reporting his trysts with Alan Baer would make much of an impact. He feared suffering repercussions and still believes payback is possible. He isn’t ready to risk the stable life it’s taken him so long to build.
At Boys Town orphanage, Bruce knew teens who skirted the perimeter of a circle of criminals, mingling at parties where weed and coke and easy cash were tantalizing payoffs for sexual favors. When they tried to go back to their ordinary lives, they discovered the mundane world was no longer accessible. When they tried to report what happened, they were threatened, mocked, punished, and jailed. Few escaped drug addiction and most endured incarceration.
Bruce landed somewhere in between.
He knew two key witnesses, Paul Bonacci and Troy Boner, and had more faith in them than he did in Alan Baer or Omaha’s Police Chief. “I already had a good sense of the judicial system and how it failed me. For years I was locked up and had not even committed a crime. On the contrary, I was a victim—and I was locked up for speaking up. To this day, I have very little faith in the justice system. It’s corrupted to the core.”
He also knew the name Larry King because news and gossip about King’s parties traveled on the streets. The alleged partygoers ranged from Omaha’s police Chief to the state’s largest newspaper publisher, Harold Andersen. Although Bruce never met King, he’d grown up just a few blocks from King’s Wirt Street headquarters in downtown Omaha. Something about what he heard made him cautious, and he stayed away from King’s parties. The connections between Omaha power players like Baer and King seemed obvious to him, but Bruce was just out of high school and restless to see the world, so he moved on to hustle California’s streets.
He read the headlines, then got on a bus with one of Baer’s off-the-books employees, a buddy of his named John who scouted sex partners for Baer, earning a living recruiting hundreds of boys and teens for his boss’s insatiable sexual appetite. Alan and Marcia Baer, now deceased, are hailed as philanthropists, but that biography is, to put it kindly, incomplete.
How do I know Bruce is telling the truth about Baer and Boys Town and the men he met on Omaha’s streets? He gains nothing from reaching out: he’ll get no fame or publicity because of this book but he risks exposure.
Bruce knows a close reading of City of Lies could betray his real name. He might not be able to hold onto his privacy. He is middle-aged—a time when we make peace with youth’s reckless choices. Telling me his story involves dredging up traumatic memories.
This book relies on four key sources. Two are books and two are documentaries. First, the books: both DeCamp and Bryant stuck with Franklin despite personal risks, the telling of which involved years of locating and interviewing victims. Both writers corroborated the disturbing stories through multiple sources.
Bryant tracked down scores of eyewitnesses to the Franklin crimes—some of whom are no longer with us. He didn’t intend to cover any of it but a magazine assignment to ferret out proof of satanic ritual abuse came his way. He believed he wouldn’t find any evidence for what he viewed as hysterical claims, but his investigations shocked and perplexed him, so he kept pursuing the story. Despite this outstanding investigative work, Bryant still gets labeled “fringe” by mainstream journalists.
Additional sources include two documentary films and widely available videotaped interviews with Alisha Owen, Paul Bonacci, and Troy Boner, as well as publicly available legal documents.
In the last three decades, the Franklin events have been researched intensively. As investigators began untangling Larry King’s web of professional and social connections, they uncovered a series of trails between King, Boys Town, the victims, law enforcement, and national-level officials and institutions. Mainstream media has either ignored this story or implied events were a calculated hoax made up by drugged-out, bored teenagers.
Every author, filmmaker, and investigator who touched Franklin has run up against multiple roadblocks, including harassment and death threats. They’ve walked a tightrope: separating fact from fiction regarding deeply disturbing topics such as satanic ritual abuse, CIA-funded mind control, corrupt state and federal law enforcement, and pedophile priests.
The most compelling evidence comes from eyewitness testimony from traumatized victims. Unlike Alice, the Franklin victims didn’t follow a magical rabbit—they were dragged down by evil men, exploited, and then re-traumatized by a corrupt legal process.
Does this story sound familiar? It’s right out of the Jeffrey Epstein/Ghislaine Maxwell playbook, but it played out in a more innocent time.
Next Chapter: Hustling Omaha
I was earning decent money on the streets of downtown Omaha in 1987, relying on my wits to make a living.
1. Carroll, Lewis, 1832-1898. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Peterborough, Ont. Broadview Press, 2000.
2. Who Took Johnny. Directed by David Beilinson, Michael Galinsky, and Suki Hawley. RumuR, Inc, 2016 (US).
3. Bryant, Nick. The Franklin Scandal: A Story of Powerbrokers, Betrayal. Trine Day, 2009.
4. DeCamp, J. W. The Franklin Cover-up: Child abuse, satanism, and murder in Nebraska. A W T Inc., 2011.
5. Conspiracy of Silence. Directed by Nick Gray. Yorkshire TV, 1993.
Jean Campbell is a freelance writer based in Arkansas. She recently published her first novel, Down and Out on the Road South, with Wings ePress, and it is also available on Amazon and via Medium.
Intriguing as always, coming from you.