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Review

There are two books inside The Franklin Cover-Up, and they spend nearly seven hundred pages wrestling each other for control of the narrative. One is a documented institutional exposé of a financial scandal and the coordinated failure of law enforcement, prosecutors, and the press to investigate credible allegations of child sexual abuse in Nebraska. The other is a sprawling conspiracy theory that connects everything from Iran-Contra to CIA mind-control programming, from the Johnny Gosch kidnapping to the Oklahoma City bombing, and from Waco to the suspicious death of a former CIA director. John DeCamp, a former Republican state senator turned defense attorney, clearly believes these two books are the same book. The question for any reader is whether the second strengthens or fatally undermines the first.

The core of DeCamp's argument, meticulously laid out in the first half of the work, is that the 1988 collapse of the Franklin Community Federal Credit Union in Omaha—a small north-side institution that somehow had nearly forty million dollars missing from its books—was not merely a financial crime but the visible edge of something far larger. When the Nebraska Legislature launched an investigation under Senators Loran Schmit and Ernie Chambers, the victim-witnesses who came forward did not stop at describing embezzlement. They described sexual abuse, drug trafficking, pornography, and ritual murder, naming prominent Omaha figures as perpetrators: police chief Robert Wadman, Omaha World-Herald publisher Harold Andersen, department store heir Alan Baer, school superintendent Deward Finch, a sitting district judge, and the credit union's politically wired manager, Larry King. Then the witnesses began recanting, the lead investigator died in a suspicious plane crash alongside his eight-year-old son, the Douglas County grand jury issued a report branding the entire story a "carefully crafted hoax" and indicted the victim-witnesses themselves for perjury, and the FBI field office in Omaha told Schmit and DeCamp, in a phrase DeCamp quotes verbatim and with evident relish: "We f—with Bob Wadman, you f—with the FBI."

Those facts are not in serious dispute. DeCamp assembles them from legislative transcripts, court records, contemporaneous press reports, and his own participation in the events as the attorney who represented victim-witnesses Paul Bonacci and Alisha Owen. The financial collapse, the investigative committee, the Caradori crash, the grand jury's perversion of its function into a mechanism for indicting accusers rather than the accused—this is a harrowing and carefully documented account of institutional self-protection at its most brazen. DeCamp is at his strongest as a prosecutor of process: he shows how Omaha police chief Robert Wadman intervened to transfer Officer Irl Carmean, the one cop who took the initial abuse reports seriously, out of his investigative unit and then attempted to have Carmean declared mentally ill. He documents how Nebraska Attorney General Robert Spire assigned a part-time investigator who did essentially nothing for months. He traces how the grand jury's foreman, Michael Flanagan, was a twenty-seven-year Union Pacific employee with his own settled complaint, and how special prosecutor Samuel Van Pelt collaborated with the grand jury to produce the "hoax" report, intimidating witnesses and clearing every named prominent figure by name without subpoenaing King. The institutional architecture of the cover-up, as DeCamp describes it, is not subtle. It is a sledgehammer.

But DeCamp is not satisfied with showing that a cover-up occurred. He wants to show what it was covering up, and here the book's evidentiary foundation begins to shift beneath the reader's feet. The victim-witness accounts that DeCamp treats as truth include organized satanic ritual abuse at Bohemian Grove, child cannibalism, infant decapitation, a national trafficking ring run by a figure called "Emilio," and a CIA-linked mind-control program code-named Monarch that supposedly used torture and drugs to create programmed multiple personalities in children for use as couriers, prostitutes, and intelligence assets. Paul Bonacci, whom DeCamp presents as the most important witness, had been diagnosed with Multiple Personality Disorder by an Omaha police psychiatrist and was described by child-abuse expert Dr. Judianne Densen-Gerber as someone for whom it would be "very difficult to lie" because MPD sufferers "switch" between personalities rather than fabricating. DeCamp treats this diagnostic framework as a form of corroboration: Bonacci is not unreliable, he argues; his very fragmentation proves the trauma that produced his knowledge.

This is an audacious move—using a contested psychiatric diagnosis to flip the credibility calculus—and it is characteristic of DeCamp's method throughout the book. Whenever the evidence gap yawns widest, he reaches for a framework that transforms the absence of corroboration into its own kind of proof. The satanic ritual abuse testimony from Bonacci, Loretta Smith, and the foster children interviewed by Kathleen Sorenson converges on details so extreme that, DeCamp argues, the children could not possibly have invented them independently. The pattern of suspicious deaths surrounding the case—fifteen individuals listed in Appendix A, including investigator Gary Caradori and his son, foster mother Sorenson, and multiple witnesses and associates—does not constitute proof of murder in any individual instance, but DeCamp piles them into a cumulative argument that something systematic is happening. And the second edition, which adds eight new chapters to the original text, extends the same pattern-matching approach to the Oklahoma City bombing (which DeCamp and former FBI agent Ted Gunderson argue was a false-flag operation involving government infiltrators), the killing of tax-protester Gordon Kahl, the Montana militia movement, and the 1996 drowning death of former CIA director William Colby, DeCamp's longtime friend and behind-the-scenes mentor in pursuing the Franklin case.

Colby's presence haunts the book. It was Colby who, in a conversation DeCamp reproduces in the Foreword, warned him away from the investigation with words that serve as the book's thesis statement: "Sometimes there are forces and events too big, too powerful, with so much at stake for other people or institutions, that you cannot do anything about them, no matter how evil or wrong they are and no matter how dedicated or sincere you are or how much evidence you have." Colby emerges as a complicated figure—a former CIA director who worked with DeCamp on the Phoenix Program in Vietnam (which DeCamp calls "the single most effective, and most feared program the Americans carried out" while acknowledging it was "brutal"), who provided behind-the-scenes support for the Franklin exposure, and whose death by apparent drowning in April 1996 DeCamp finds manifestly suspicious. In one of the book's most striking passages, Colby tells DeCamp that what worries him about the militia movement is not their weapons or paramilitary training but "something far more serious, that I fear our politicians do not see, cannot see, and refuse to deal with"—a looming crisis of legitimacy as ordinary Americans lose faith in their government.

The Colby connection also gestures toward the book's most ambitious claim: that the Franklin case connects upward into the Reagan-Bush national security apparatus. DeCamp traces Larry King's involvement with Citizens for America, the Iran-Contra public-relations group, and his fundraising for Republican figures. He reproduces victim testimony placing George H. W. Bush at Washington sex parties (the Webb foster children claimed they attended parties where they saw Bush), links King's credit union to the pattern of S&Ls used to launder Contra drug money reported by Houston Post journalist Pete Brewton, and draws on Gary Webb's "Dark Alliance" series to argue that CIA-connected cocaine trafficking deliberately devastated Black communities. Chapter 13, "The Washington Connection," further ties Franklin to the Craig Spence call-boy ring—a documented scandal involving White House tour access for a prostitution operation—and to Robert Keith Gray, Oliver North, and the Carmen, Carmen and Hugel PR firm with its own alleged CIA ties. These are real names and real scandals, but DeCamp's connective tissue between them and the Franklin Credit Union collapse consists almost entirely of inference, the victim-witness testimony whose credibility is the very thing in dispute, and the assumption that proximity equals operation.

What is genuinely valuable in The Franklin Cover-Up is its documentation of how a local power structure can mobilize to protect itself. The Ak-Sar-Ben business elite that DeCamp profiles—ConAgra's Mike Harper, Peter Kiewit's Walter Scott, Union Pacific's Michael Walsh, Mutual of Omaha's Thomas Skutt, and Warren Buffett hovering above them all—constituted an interlocking oligarchy that, through campaign contributions, board appointments, and the Omaha World-Herald's monopoly on regional news coverage, could "make and break political careers." The newspaper's publisher, Harold Andersen, chaired Franklin's advisory board while his reporters covered the scandal. DeCamp quotes one reporter, Gabriella Stern, as describing the editorial policy as "protect the little fag because he would lead to the big fag"—a conscious decision to bury the story. When Senator Ernie Chambers pushed the investigation, the World-Herald branded him a rumormonger and a demagogue. This is classic muckraking of the sort that sits comfortably within the investigative-journalism tradition, even if DeCamp is an advocate rather than a neutral reporter.

The book is weakest precisely where it is most ambitious. The claim that a satanic cult network practicing ritual murder operates under elite protection in Nebraska and nationally—an argument DeCamp advances through Loretta Smith's detailed accounts of infant decapitation and child cannibalism, through Bonacci's Bohemian Grove testimony, and through Sorenson's interviews with over thirty foster children—rests entirely on uncorroborated testimony from traumatized individuals whose accounts were being actively dismissed by law enforcement and mental health professionals as products of suggestion and recovered-memory fabrication. DeCamp is aware of this counter-narrative and devotes considerable energy to attacking its chief exponent, FBI occult-crime expert Kenneth Lanning, whom former agent Ted Gunderson calls "probably the most effective and foremost speaker for the satanic movement in this country." This is not persuasive refutation; it is ad hominem deployed in lieu of independent corroboration. The Monarch mind-control material, drawn heavily from Anton Chaitkin's New Federalist article and DeCamp's conversations with Colby, is even more thinly sourced, relying on a taxonomy of programmed personalities (ALPHA, BETA, DELTA, OMEGA, GAMMA) that has the formal structure of intelligence tradecraft without any verifiable provenance.

The Oklahoma City bombing chapters, which consume the latter portion of the second edition, represent the book's furthest drift from its documentary core. DeCamp and Gunderson argue that the fertilizer bomb alone could not have destroyed the Murrah Building, that government infiltrators were the unidentified John Doe 1 and 2, and that the FBI obstructed evidence examination by rushing the building's demolition. These claims are advanced with the same prosecutorial confidence DeCamp brings to the Douglas County grand jury's rigged process, but they lack the documentary anchor—legislative transcripts, court records, contemporaneous news articles—that gives the Franklin section whatever persuasive force it has. The reader who has followed DeCamp through the meticulous unspooling of the Omaha cover-up is asked, in these later chapters, to accept a much broader and less substantiated narrative on the strength of DeCamp's conviction and the credentials of his associates.

The book sits at an unusual intersection of canonical traditions, and this is part of what makes it difficult to assess. As a work of investigative journalism—a muckraking exposé of institutional corruption—it operates within a recognizable lineage, marshaling documents and named sources to make a case that demands institutional accountability. As a work of conservative critique, it voices the Reagan-era Republican's distrust of permanent bureaucratic power, defending the Phoenix Program and the Vietnam War while attacking the Justice Department as an unaccountable fourth branch of government. As a libertarian document, it champions the militia movement and tax protesters, treating Ruby Ridge and Waco as federal atrocities and Gordon Kahl as a martyr rather than a fugitive. And as a work of radical institutional critique—a tradition it enters through the epilogue's invocation of Melville's Billy Budd—it argues that "the system" will sacrifice innocents to preserve itself, not because any individual is evil but because the system's survival demands it. DeCamp writes that he finally understood the Franklin case after watching Billy Budd on television: "Protect the 'system' at all costs. The 'system' is the only ultimate sacred cow—not any particular law or constitution, but only 'the system.'"

But The Franklin Cover-Up also occupies territory that the library's existing vocabulary strains to accommodate: the satanic-panic investigative tradition of the 1980s and 1990s, with its fusion of recovered-memory testimony, ritual-abuse allegations, and the claim that a literal cult of elite perpetrators is being shielded by the same institutions DeCamp documents shielding King and his associates; the conspiracy-literature tradition that seeks to explain discrete events as manifestations of a single hidden hand; and the anti-government militia tradition that the book simultaneously chronicles and, through its legal advocacy for the Montana Seven, actively participates in. To read DeCamp alongside the investigative journalism canon is to see a work that begins with journalism's tools and then reaches for something those tools cannot validate. To read him alongside the satanic-panic literature is to see a work that shares its raw materials—the testimony of children whose abuse is being disbelieved by the very institutions that should protect them—but wraps them in a political and financial documentary apparatus that the panic literature rarely attempted.

What is a reader to make of this hybrid? The book's quality assessment, as the digestion pipeline records, is deeply mixed: strong on the financial and political cover-up, substantially weaker on the extraordinary claims that depend entirely on uncorroborated victim testimony and DeCamp's pattern-matching. The documentary record of institutional failure—the World-Herald's conflict of interest, the grand jury's rigged process, the FBI's witness intimidation, the suspicious circumstances of Caradori's death—is damning and deserves the attention DeCamp demands. The satanic-cult network, the Monarch programming, the Oklahoma City false-flag, and the claim that fifteen deaths connected to the case were all murders rather than the tragic detritus of a community in crisis—these are assertions, not demonstrations.

The book is for readers who want to understand how a local power elite can capture the institutions of accountability and turn them into weapons against whistleblowers and victims. It is for readers willing to hold two thoughts simultaneously: that DeCamp documents a real and egregious cover-up, and that his explanation for what was being covered up may substantially exceed the evidence he is able to present. It is not for readers who demand that every claim be independently sourced and verified, because the second half of the book simply cannot meet that standard. DeCamp, to his credit, understands the dynamic: he quotes Colby warning that the case is "too big," that he is "too small," that "good does not always triumph and that evil, with its many faces, does sometimes succeed." The tragedy of this book is that the real, documented evil—the destruction of children's lives and the institutional machinery that protected their abusers—gets tangled in a web of claims so extraordinary that they provide cover for the very system DeCamp set out to expose.

Notable Quotes

What you have to understand, John, is that sometimes there are forces and events too big, too powerful, with so much at stake for other people or institutions, that you cannot do anything about them, no matter how evil or wrong they are and no matter how dedicated or sincere you are or how much evidence you have. That is simply one of the hard facts of life you have to face.

Former CIA Director William Colby warning DeCamp to abandon the Franklin investigation for his own safety — power, institutional corruption, limits of justice, self-preservation

Sometimes there are forces too powerful for us to whip them individually, in the time frame that we would like. We have to keep working at our goal. But we have to be sensible enough, not to risk everything and get ourselves destroyed or killed in the process. That victory we seek may take much longer than we wanted, and come in ways we never anticipated.

Colby's advice to DeCamp, drawing on his experience watching the Soviet Union collapse from within — patience, strategy, long-term justice, prudence

Then it struck me like a ton of bricks: It was over. Here was the head of the CIA, once hated and feared by the Soviet Union, wandering unwatched and unguarded around Red Square, after spending the previous week meeting with their leaders, trying to help them save themselves from economic collapse and political revolution. And nobody cared.

Colby describing his midnight walk through Red Square as his only victory parade after forty years of Cold War — victory, anti-climax, history, the Cold War

Accusations of child abuse are the worst accusations you can make against an individual. That is because, no matter what the truth of the matter, once the accusation is made, it will never be able to be rubbed completely off, even if the individual accused is as innocent and pure as can be.

DeCamp's legal counsel to Senator Schmit about the gravity of pursuing the Franklin investigation — child abuse, false accusations, legal caution, reputation

If even half of what I have heard is true, this is the biggest thing to ever hit Nebraska.

Investigator Gary Caradori to his wife Sandie, early in his work for the Legislature's Franklin committee — investigation, scale of corruption, discovery

We've got them! There's no way they can get out of it now!

Caradori's last phone call to Senator Schmit about new evidence, days before he and his son died in a plane crash — investigation, breakthrough, tragic irony, suspicious death

There were a lot of people in this state who wanted to see Gary dead. They got their wish. The question to be answered is whether it was a coincidence.

Senator Schmit's statement to reporters on the morning of Gary Caradori's death — suspicious death, political courage, investigation

I felt that I could call anyone in this city.

Larry King's response when asked if he had the access to call the Chief of Police and get evidence released from custody — power, corruption, access, impunity

If you mess with him, you'll get your legs broken.

What people in north Omaha told Boys Town social worker Julie Walters when she asked about Larry King — intimidation, community silence, fear, power

On the outside he has all the appearances of an upstanding citizen; but underneath he's very dirty.

Community member's description of Larry King to Boys Town social worker Julie Walters during her investigation — appearances, duality, hidden corruption

Don't go. Nebraska is death-laced.

A New York State Police member's warning to Dr. Judianne Densen-Gerber before her trip to Nebraska to investigate the Franklin case — danger, intimidation, suspicious deaths

My statements are true. I'll never, never change my story. The truth is the truth.

Alisha Owen during her perjury trial, refusing to recant her testimony about abuse by prominent Nebraskans — courage, truth-telling, perseverance under pressure

I couldn't change my story when the FBI asked me to, because I can look into the mirror and know I am telling the truth. Children ask for justice, while adults plead for mercy. Your honor, I stand before you here today and I ask for justice.

Alisha Owen's statement at her sentencing hearing after being convicted of perjury — justice, courage, institutional failure, children's rights

Somebody has to tell the story, and it might as well be me.

Paul Bonacci's introduction to his written account of the abuse he suffered, prepared for his lawyer DeCamp — testimony, courage, bearing witness, victim advocacy

I'm a 23 year old man who loves God and wants to do the right thing to prevent other children from being abused. I'm against anyone harming a child in any way. I'm only wanting to see the men stopped from hurting others. They can kill me. I'm ready to die for what's right. If by my death I can prevent a child from being abused, I'd do it.

Paul Bonacci in a letter from prison to a friend about his determination to continue testifying — sacrifice, faith, justice, protecting children

The first human defense mechanism against untenable horrific facts is to say that they don't exist.

Dr. Judianne Densen-Gerber testifying before the Senate Franklin committee about why people refuse to believe child abuse testimony — denial, psychology, child abuse, institutional blindness

No one person could have masterminded this without the compliance and the acquiescence and cooperation of a number of people, some of whom had to be in official positions.

Senator Schmit warning the Franklin committee about the scope of what they would encounter — institutional corruption, complicity, systemic abuse

What Larry King is doing is the tip of an iceberg and he's not in it by himself. One thing I told the Attorney General is that I don't want Larry King to commit suicide and I don't want any accidents that will take him out.

Senator Ernie Chambers expressing concern that King would be silenced before the full scope of the scandal could be exposed — witness protection, political corruption, cover-up

When King entertained, it was a hot ticket. Virtually every high-ranking black member of the Reagan Administration had been out to lunch, over for drinks, or at a dinner party. The food and drink were first rate, as was the mix of people—black, white, Republican, Democrat, young, old.

A public relations man hired by Larry King describing King's Washington D.C. parties off Embassy Row, where the emphasis was on the young — political access, bipartisan corruption, networking, hidden abuse

Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freeness of speech.

DeCamp quoting Benjamin Franklin to illustrate how the Omaha World-Herald's control of Nebraska's press enabled the cover-up — press freedom, censorship, democracy, institutional power

We assume from their choice of words—carefully crafted hoax—that the Grand Jury was persuaded that the testimony of the witnesses corroborated each other, and included facts and circumstances which were readily verifiable and attested to by other witnesses. Otherwise, it could not be logically deemed 'carefully crafted.' If it was carefully crafted, who crafted it and when?

The legislative Franklin committee's official response to the grand jury report, pointing out its logical contradiction — logic, institutional accountability, cover-up, grand jury

Oh God, forgive me. They guaranteed if I talk here today, they will put me away for twenty years. Guaranteed I would never see the light of day again. Told me that I would be charged with perjury for my original testimony, if I opened my mouth today in court.

Troy Boner whispering to DeCamp in the courthouse after being cornered and threatened by prosecutors before he could testify at Alisha Owen's hearing — witness intimidation, fear, institutional coercion, cover-up

I do not understand it, Your Honor. As God is my witness, I do not think that there is a judge or other person involved in this case who does not know that horrible injustice has been done. Everybody knows that Alisha Owen is telling the truth and that she is being punished for it.

DeCamp's plea to Judge Enbody in chambers after Troy Boner was intimidated into invoking the Fifth Amendment — institutional failure, justice denied, despair, truth suppressed

I am just a man. I am not a god. I wish I were. I have no choice in what I have done. I am just a man, just a man, not a god.

Judge Enbody's response to DeCamp, before directing him to read Billy Budd to understand why the system sacrifices the innocent — powerlessness, institutional constraints, moral anguish, judicial limits

If you want to understand the entire Franklin case, I can help you. Go read Billy Budd. If you will do that, John, and if you understand the book, then you will understand the what and why of Franklin, and why it can be no other way.

Judge Enbody's final words to DeCamp, comparing the Franklin case to Melville's story of an innocent man hanged to preserve the system — institutional self-preservation, sacrifice of innocents, literary allegory, systemic corruption

Protect the 'system' at all costs. The 'system' is the only ultimate sacred cow—not any particular law or constitution, but only 'the system.' Because, ultimately, it is the system which makes certain that the individuals functioning within it—from judges to lawyers, to prosecutors, to politicians, to businessmen—have their places and positions, and opportunities and pecking order, and future.

DeCamp's final understanding of the Franklin case after reading Billy Budd, as directed by Judge Enbody — institutional self-preservation, systemic corruption, the nature of power, justice vs. order