Dancing With The Devil: How Sigmund Freud Paved the Way for a Century of Ritual Abuse (Part IV)
Franklin & the Presidio: forgotten scandals...
“Mein Kampf is a political Satanic Bible. For control of mass movements of human beings, it is far more important than anything ever written by Jefferson, Locke, Marx, Lenin, or Kissinger.”
— Lt. Col. Michael A. Aquino, The Church of Satan (1983)
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This country has a bad habit of pretending its worst scandals were misunderstandings.
The McMartin Preschool case is one such example. A case so sprawling, so grotesque in its implications, that the only politically safe conclusion was to declare the entire affair a delusion. No matter how many children said the same things, no matter how often their stories overlapped, the public was told there was nothing to see. And the Mockingbird Media happily obliged in spreading that narrative — “Satanic Panic” they called it — a convenient label to silence dissenting narratives and paint those concerned with institutional abuses as religious zealots.
While the Franklin Scandal and Presidio Daycare case appear different on the surface, each case reveals the same structural failure: when children described organized abuse, Federal institutions moved to protect powerful people and not the victims. What distinguishes the Presidio case from earlier ones was not the allegations themselves necessarily, but the personnel involved. The appearance of a senior Army psychological operations (PsyOp) officer in the testimony of multiple children — the infamous Satanist and founder of the Temple of Set, Michael A. Aquino — forced a reconsideration of what had previously been dismissed as impossible.
Stephen Flowers’ account of Aquino’s intellectual formation provides a reliable starting point for this analysis. His glowing description of the late Lt. Col. is instructive (emphasis mine):
Although Aquino is a highly qualified intellectual, holding a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of California, and a man of numerous other accomplishments in the objective universe, he also brings various purely magical qualities to the pursuits of the transcendental branch of the left-hand path. Whereas Anton LaVey tended to gravitate mostly toward the practice of “lesser magic,” Aquino’s practical application of what he calls “greater black magic” returns the technology of magic to the intellectual levels it enjoyed millennia ago. …
Another important “mentor” would be Aleister Crowley…
Aquino’s third mentor died well over 2,000 years ago, but his shadow has been cast over Western thought for as many solstices: Plato. The core of Aquino’s cosmology is solidly Platonic. In referring to the ancient Hellenic master’s ideas he follows in the magical traditions of the Hermeticists and Renaissance magicians.
— Stephen E. Flowers, Ph. D., Lords of the Left-hand Path: From the Cult of Set to the Church of Satan (Pg. 376-78)
A storied PsyOp officer, a Nazi aficionado, a participant in the infamous Vietnam-era Phoenix Program, and the founder of a religious order whose metaphysics rested on the intentional manipulation of consciousness — all of this existed without friction inside the system. That tells us more than any allegation ever could.
— (Left) Michael A. Aquino. (Right) Aquino can be seen with Anton LeVay and Sammy Davis Jr. c. 1973.
His autobiographical remarks only reinforce this pattern. Aquino, speaking of his own birth in the third person, states (emphasis mine):
Collectors of magical happenstance may take note of the following concerning the persona of Michael Aquino: He was born in 1946, precisely nine months after a Working by Crowley’s California disciples to create a homunculus per a secret instruction of Crowley’s to the IX degree of his Ordo Templi Orientis. He was also born dead, raising the question of the nature of the force inhabiting his subsequently revived body. On his chest he bears the same whorled swastika of hair born by Crowley and Buddha, and his eyebrows have always naturally curled upward into the horns described in the Biblical Book of Revelation (13:11).
— The Book of Coming Forth by Night
It is difficult to assess such self-aggrandizing claims at face value, but, if there is any truth to it, only strengthens the contention that modern occult sects, such as the Temple of Set, are utterly beholden to Crowley’s arcane system — in more ways than one. That said, the young Aquino does bear a striking resemblance to a young Crowley.
Aquino’s career in psychological warfare began within the formative years of American counterinsurgency doctrine — specifically the years dominated by Operation Phoenix. The Phoenix Program was not only designed to defeat an army, but to dismantle a society. The program included the usage of black site detention centers, “interrogation” (i.e. torture) programs, targeted assassinations, and the systematic disruption of civilian populations. Aquino, a young officer at the time, cut his teeth within this operational environment.
When viewed through this lens, Aquino’s seminal work on psychological operations, From PSYOP To Mind War: The Psychology Of Victory, reads less like an innovation. (Aquino’s co-author and then commanding officer, Paul E. Vallely, is currently on the advisory board of TPUSA.) It restates Phoenix’s underlying assumptions in abstract form: that the decisive conflict is over perception; that populations behave according to managed stimuli; that the State’s objective is to actualize desired outcomes by saturating the informational battlespace. The occult vocabulary is largely absent, but the operative logic is identical. Aquino’s metaphysics and the military’s doctrine were parallel expressions of the same view of human nature.
This situates the Presidio case within the broader historical patterns of ritualized abuse documented in Children for the Devil and in clinical literature such as Ritual Abuse and Mind Control.
“You have a terrible witch-hunt going on, and it’s a witch-hunt in the classical sense.”
― Lt. Col. Michael A. Aquino, Comments on the Presidio Daycare Investigation
The Presidio case must be understood against this backdrop.
In November 1986, a three-year-old girl told her mother she had been sexually abused at the Presidio Army Base Child Development Center (CDC). A subsequent medical examination confirmed that she had signs of abuse and had contracted chlamydia. Within weeks, multiple families reported similar disclosures.
The pattern, at this point, is unmistakable. Children displayed sexualized behaviors inconsistent with their age, nightmares, bed-wetting, and phobic reactions to the daycare building. When questioned by trained professionals, they described acts of penetration, forced oral copulation, death threats, and settings that bore all the hallmarks of occult ritualism — knowledge that a small child should not have. Tate summarizes one such disclosure (emphasis mine):
What Kelly told her therapist was, by 1987, less of a shock than it might have been. She said she had been taken as usual by her father to the daycare centre at the US Army’s Presidio base in San Francisco. Sometimes bad men and women had touched her bottom there; sometimes she had been taken off the base and abused.
In particular she remembered being taken to a house with a black room with a cross painted on the ceiling. Men and women wearing robes had abused her; one man had pushed his penis into her anus, vagina and mouth; others had taken photographs.
The investigators added the case to their files. More than fifty-eight very young children had been abused at the Presidio base and many were independently disclosing details of what could only have been rituals - cloaks, candles, knives, the eating of faeces and drinking of urine, the murder of babies.
— Tim Tate, Children for the Devil (Pg. 49)
By early 1987, the number of victims had risen dramatically to fifty-eight: all were under four years of age during the period of abuse. Medical examinations confirmed multiple cases of chlamydia — a statistic that cannot be explained by fantasy or religious “hysteria” (Tate, Pg. 155).
— (Left) Aquino can be seen using an SS dagger in an occult ritual. (Right) Lilith Aquino, wife of Michael Aquino and co-founder of the Temple of Set.
Immediately, the stink of a cover up began wafting through the Presidio base. In an adjacent building used by one of the primary suspects, a fire was intentionally started. Investigators identified the point of origin: the very room used by the children for naps, thus destroying all physical evidence. Although the fire occurred shortly after parents began reporting the abuse to Military Police and local authorities, the Army treated it as a simple case of vandalism.
As disclosures multiplied, certain details recurred with uniformity. Tate records (emphasis mine):
Across the city and throughout the surrounding areas of California, young children who no longer had any contact with each other repeated the same allegations to their parents. The story told to the mother, Debbie, was typical:
My boys told me that they had gone to the daycare centre, where several adults molested them in rituals. The adults wore robes and chanted. There were candles and the kids said they were made to eat human excrement and drink urine and blood.
— Tim Tate, Children for the Devil (Pg. 49)
It is historically important to note that similar testimony appears in cases across the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom during the 1970-80’s. The symbolic elements are not unique to Presidio, they are consistent with patterns identified by clinicians studying organized abuse networks.
By mid-1987, the names of specific adults began to appear in the children’s disclosures. One of these was then Major Michael Aquino, who maintained a residence on base at the time. The children described his house — specifically the interior — with remarkable accuracy. Army Criminal Investigation Division (CID) obtained and executed a search warrant, finding black walls with inverted crosses, ritual paraphernalia, and photographic equipment that corroborated the children’s testimony.
Another feature of this case was the recurring disclosure of off-base abuse. Tate records that numerous children described being transported to other locations, and this was initially treated as evidence of unreliability:
Both were convinced that they had been taken to implausible - or downright impossible - places prior to being abused: a dungeon, a jungle - even an aeroplane. …the youngsters’ disclosures matched both those from other Presidio victims and the national pattern of children’s testimony.
— Tim Tate, Children for the Devil (Pg. 163)
This fact becomes intelligible through the clinical literature on dissociation: children exposed to overwhelming, structured trauma frequently distort spatial and temporal memory, but the core of their disclosures remains stable.
This is the point at which Aquino’s public narrative diverges sharply from the historical record. His most repeated claim was that the case originated with the girl’s “pastor father” who projected his religious “bigotry” onto Aquino and the staff. This is demonstrably false. The girl disclosed it to her mother who took her for a medical evaluation, abuse was confirmed, and only then was CID notified. Aquino’s second claim was that he was not at the base because he had been transferred by this point. While technically true, this is also misleading since, as a reservist, Aquino could travel freely. Housing records confirm he and his wife Lilith still maintained a residence on the base, and Aquino later acknowledged visiting the base during the relevant time period. His third claim — that “there was no evidence of abuse” — is simply incompatible with the known facts of the case. Against this backdrop, Aquino’s public and repeated denials are shown to be increasingly untenable.
The Army’s official response proceeded along rather predictable lines. First, it minimized the scope, limiting the investigation to a narrow time window. Second, it treated each disclosure as an isolated occurrence. Third, it discouraged coordination between families. Fourth, it declined to involve external agencies until public pressure demanded it. Fifth, it reframed the ritual elements as “fantasy.” And sixth, it closed ranks around Aquino even after the children named him and his wife repeatedly, including his distinct eyebrows. The Army’s official report, notedly, did not state he was innocent of these crimes, merely that the evidence was “insufficient” to charge him. But the logic of this conclusion breaks down under scrutiny: children too young to fabricate such detailed lies had perfectly described the rooms of Aquino’s house, forensic evidence of abuse clearly existed, and multiple children independently named the same suspect.
In the end, only one individual — Gary Hambright — was charged, and the charges were dismissed for “lack of evidence.” The parents sued the federal government, and the case was settled for an undisclosed amount.
Ultimately, the Presidio case was the success of a containment strategy, and the Franklin Scandal illustrates what happens when that same logic governs a political network instead of a military one.
“The powerful sating their appetites for forbidden fruit via pedophilia and pedophilic sadism are evils that date back millennia: The Roman emperor Tiberius reportedly indulged in pedophilia and then murdered his victims. Moreover, since I started work on this story, pedophile rings linked to the powerful have been exposed in Portugal, Belgium, Chile, and Mexico. The Portuguese ring procured victims from Portugal’s version of Boys Town, and the Belgian pedophile ring reportedly utilized blackmail and had satanic practitioners. The Belgian ring also mirrored Franklin in the respect that many Belgians, including law enforcement officers, concluded it entailed a massive cover-up.”
— Nick Bryant, The Franklin Scandal: A Story of Powerbrokers Child Abuse & Betrayal (Epilogue)
The Franklin Credit Union scandal broke in 1988, initially reported as a major financial crime: the collapse of a community credit union amidst accusations of multimillion-dollar embezzlement. But as investigations unfolded, a far more disturbing reality emerged — one that implicated national political figures, social institutions like Boys Town, and federal law enforcement in what two major investigators came to describe as an organized cover-up of child sexual abuse and trafficking.
The two principal authors who have exposed this case are John W. DeCamp and Nick Bryant. DeCamp, a former Green beret, decorated Vietnam veteran, and four-term Nebraska state senator, served as legal counsel to the Nebraska Legislature’s Franklin Committee. His 1992 book, The Franklin Cover-Up, draws from subpoenaed documents, sealed testimonies, and investigative records gathered during the committee’s inquiry. Though widely ignored by the mainstream press, DeCamp’s work offers one of the only comprehensive records of what was uncovered — and suppressed.
Nick Bryant, an investigative journalist based in New York, spent seven years independently verifying DeCamp’s claims. His 2009 book, The Franklin Scandal, builds on DeCamp’s work but also includes hundreds of interviews and public records obtained through Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. Bryant’s research confirmed many of the original witnesses’ stories and traced the political protections afforded to Larry King, the scandal’s central figure. Together, their work forms the backbone of what is known about the Franklin case.
Lawrence E. “Larry” King Jr. was the flamboyant manager of the Franklin Community Federal Credit Union, a small Omaha bank set up to serve North Omaha’s underserved Black community. Bryant describes King as a GOP high-roller and the fastest rising African-American star of the 1980’s. King served as Vice‐Chairman for Finance of the National Black Republican Council and campaigned for his personal friend George H.W. Bush during his 1988 run. On November 4th, 1988, federal agents raided the credit union and, as Bryant reports, the National Credit Union Administration “ultimately concluded that $39.4 million had been stolen.” King was indicted on 40 counts, including conspiracy, fraud and embezzlement. These facts alone are extraordinary: a small credit union had been running a massive Ponzi scheme, the proceeds of which had been funneled into GOP campaigns from the presidency on down.
— Lawrence E. King Jr.
But, as DeCamp and Bryant both show, the Franklin Scandal was only partly about missing money: behind the audit trails lay far darker allegations of a nationwide child‐abuse ring. Victims began coming forward in 1988, including Paul Bonacci and Alisha Owen, who described years of sexual exploitation facilitated by King and protected by his political allies. Bonacci, who suffered from DID as diagnosed by multiple clinicians, gave detailed testimony describing abuse at specific locations involving known public figures.
Dozens of children, many from foster homes and the Catholic orphanage Boys Town, disclosed being trafficked across state lines to be sexually abused at parties attended by prominent businessmen, politicians, and judges. Some described being photographed and filmed; others claimed they witnessed ritual murders. Medical evidence, taped interviews, and cross-corroborated testimony began to build a coherent picture: that Franklin had served as a front for a pedophile network with high-level political protection. One such figure, Harold Andersen, publisher of the Omaha World-Herald, was repeatedly named by victims but never indicted. Despite being smeared by the FBI as an unreliable witness, Bryant later confirmed that Bonacci had passed multiple polygraph exams (Bryant, Ch. 10).
Almost immediately, evidence of a systemic cover-up began to appear. As DeCamp notes:
The Justice Department, acting through the FBI and the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Omaha, emerges from the record of the Franklin investigations not so much as a party to the cover-up, but as its coordinator. Rigging grand juries, harrassment of witnesses, incitement to perjury and tampering with evidence—federal personnel were seen to apply all of those techniques in the Franklin case.
— John W. DeCamp, The Franklin Cover-Up (Ch.14)
In 1990, two grand juries convened — one state, one federal. Both concluded that there was no credible evidence of abuse. Instead, the victims were prosecuted:
The Douglas County grand jury proclaimed on July 23, 1990, that the allegations and evidence of Franklin-linked child abuse were a “carefully crafted hoax.” Its report implied that the perpetrators were Alisha Owen, journalist Michael Casey, and the late Gary Caradori. According to testimony of Alisha Owen and her parents before the Franklin committee, the FBI had this line already in March of 1990, before the grand jury even started sitting.
Alisha testified to the Franklin committee on June 11, 1990, before promulgation of the grand jury report, that her former lawyer Pam Vuchetich had come to see her in the spring,
giving a proposal from the FBI that if I recanted my story then nothing would happen to me, I could possibly get out of prison and no charges would ever be brought against me. Such as, if I recanted my story, they wouldn’t charge me with perjury, they wouldn’t charge me with lying, they would just drop the whole thing, they would write letters to the judge asking for my sentence reduction so I could get out of prison. And if—and in this deal I would have to say that Gary Caradori and Mike Casey came to me, they set this whole thing up, they told me what to say, we got scripts, we were promised monetary values. And I would be taken care of.
— John W. DeCamp, The Franklin Cover-Up (Ch.14)
However, much of the testimony that supported these conclusions was obtained under pressure. Troy Boner, another victim and key witness, later signed a sworn affidavit some years later admitting he had lied under FBI threat.
— Nebraska State Senator John W. DeCamp.
No serious accounting of the Franklin scandal can avoid reckoning with the grim toll it took on those who came too close to uncovering the truth.
The most consequential of these deaths was that of Gary Caradori, the chief investigator for the Nebraska State Legislature’s Franklin Committee. Caradori had conducted extensive videotaped interviews with key victims, including Alisha Owen and Paul Bonacci. As he began to identify further perpetrators, Caradori told colleagues he was being surveilled, and that his phones were tapped. His wife later confirmed that FBI agents seemed to know his movements in advance and that break-ins had occurred at their home. On July 11th, 1990, Caradori’s private plane exploded mid-air while returning from Chicago: both he and his 8-year-old son perished in the crash. Disturbingly, witnesses reported seeing a flash just before the crash occurred, with the debris field scattered for miles.
He was not alone. DeCamp catalogs a litany of others whose deaths, while not directly investigated, form a discernible pattern:
— Troy Boner was admitted to the hospital in an agitated state, exclaiming “they’re after me, they’re after me because of this book.” He would be found dead the next morning.
— Joe Malek, a known associate of King and co-owner of Peony Park, a venue tied to the abuse parties, died of a gunshot wound.
— Curtis Tucker, an associate of King’s, fell to his death at a Holiday Inn in Omaha, Nebraska.
— Aaron Owen, brother of victim Alisha Owen, was found hanging in his jail cell just hours before he was scheduled to testify at his sister’s hearing.
— Charlie Rogers, King’s homosexual lover, told friends he feared for his life. Days later, he was found “with his head blown off by a shotgun in what was ruled a suicide.”
— Bill Baker, another of King’s lovers and associates, was found shot in the back of the head.
— Dan Ryan, another King associate, was discovered strangled in his car.
DeCamp aptly summarizes the sordid affair: by mid-1991 “Alisha Owen was found guilty, and… charges against Paul Bonacci [were] dropped… the door on the Franklin case was slammed shut for good.”
“I fear, just like any alleged child victims in this bizarre tragedy, that the rich and the powerful will use their positions of power and control of institutions of government to shut up those who would speak out and bring things to a head.”
— State Senator John W. DeCamp, The Franklin Cover-Up (Ch.9)
Ritual abuse is not a historical anomaly but a modern manifestation of ancient technologies of domination, now merged with state power and “secular” psychology.
When accusations of organized abuse intersected with political or military power structures, the evidentiary threshold for prosecution disappeared. The question was not whether the allegations were credible, but whether they could be permitted to proceed. In each case, what might have constituted corroboration in a lower-stakes context — medical confirmation, polygraph results, consistent disclosures across victims — was reclassified as unreliable or even fictitious.
The story doesn’t end with the Presidio or Franklin — it only deepens.
As we have seen, Franklin’s institutional cover-up stretched from the Omaha chief of police to the FBI and Justice Department. Indeed, as we will explore in our final chapter, one of the critical organizations deflecting blame away from the accused and casting doubt upon the victims, the False Memory Syndrome Foundation, has its fair share of sordid associations. These revelations suggest broader patterns, and the mist around Franklin leads directly into our next case study: The Finders cult, which similarly involves ritual abuse, overt intelligence ties, and the systematic silencing of whistleblowers.
— Dancing with the Devil IV, digital art, 2025.
Concluded in Part V…
“Affix now my image as it was given to you, so that all who read of these matters may now look upon the likeness of Set. The Word of the Aeon of Set is XEPER— Become.”
― Lt. Col. Michael A. Aquino, The Book of Coming Forth by Night
Get Scipio’s latest book, The Empire of Lies: the American Empire unmasked.
Information is a weapon. Arm your family and friends.
Hit the Tip Jar and help spread the message!
This post contains affiliate links, which means I may receive a commission or affiliate fee for purchases made through these links.
Meet Scipio & get practical tools for wellness and preparedness at the Sovereign Health Summit — save 5% with promo code SCIPIO.
Unlock the mysteries of Biblical cosmology and enrich your faith with some of the top rated Christian reads at BooksOnline.club.
Click the image below and be sure to use promo code SCIPIO for 10% off your order at HeavensHarvest.com: your one stop shop for emergency food, heirloom seeds and survival supplies.
Further Research
The Franklin Scandal: A Story of Powerbrokers, Child Abuse & Betrayal by Nick Bryant
The Franklin Cover-Up: Child Abuse, Satanism, and Murder in Nebraska (2nd Edition) by John W. DeCamp
Ritual Abuse and Mind Control: The Manipulation of Attachment Needs by Epstein, et al.
Cult and Ritual Abuse: Narratives, Evidence, and Healing Approaches by James R. Noblitt & Pamela P. Noblitt
Aquino’s bio reads like a black ops Intel plant into where ever he went.
this may sound like a bizarre theory, might there be an attractant drawing demonic forces to the San Francisco area (including Stanford / Silicon Valley to south, bohemian grove to north) with unusual oscillations in electromagnetic activity from the San Andreas fault, web.
after spending a day in Point Reyes directly over the fault I developed stroke-like symptoms being unable to clearly speak or control my words and the worst headache of my life