About the Video

In mid-1993, after The Franklin Cover-Up had been circulating for almost a year, the British-based TV station, Yorkshire Television, sent a top-notch team to Nebraska to launch its own investigation of the Franklin case. Yorkshire had a contract with the Discovery Channel to produce a documentary on the case for American television.

They spent many months in Nebraska, and also travelled this country from one end to the other, interviewing, filming, and documenting piece-by-piece the Franklin story as I had told it in the book. They spent somewhere between a quarter-million and one-half million dollars investigating the story, deploying probably a thousand times the resources and abilities that I personally had.

Over the year that I worked with them, I was amazed at the team’s ability to gather new documents and witnesses which kept opening up new and frightening facts about Franklin. They were a crack team. In the final weeks that they were in Nebraska, they expressed their certainty that they would win awards for this documented horror story of government-sanctioned abuse of children; and government protection of some of this country’s most powerful businessmen and politicians, who had been the chief acts in the Franklin story.

Finally, the big day came. Their documentary was to air nation-wide on the Discovery Channel on May 3, 1994. It was advertised in the TV Guide and in newspapers for that day. But no one ever saw that program. At the last minute, and without explanation, it was pulled from the air. It was not shown then, and has never been broadcast anywhere since.

I have a copy of that program, which arrived anonymously in my mail in late 1995. When I watched this pirated copy, I could see clearly why the program had been suppressed. Conspiracy of Silence proved, beyond doubt, that the essential points I had stressed in the book (and more) were all true.

For instance, the team had interviewed Troy Boner. Sometime after that grand jury was over, Troy, guilt-stricken because of his lying over Gary Caradori’s death, contacted me and told the truth about what had happened. This is recorded in a remarkable affidavit (see Chapter 20). The Yorkshire TV team spent a small fortune to confirm Troy’s charges. They flew Troy to Chicago and paid for a lengthy polygraph (lie detector) test at the Keeler Polygraph Institute. With the results of that test, the Yorkshire team was so convinced that Troy was telling the truth, that they featured him in their documentary.

It was only in mid-1996, that I finally pieced together, through sources I am not at liberty to disclose, what happened to stop the broadcast of this documentary.

1. At the time the Yorkshire TV team and the Discovery Channel were doing the documentary, they had no idea how high up the case would go into Government, and what major institutions and personalities in this country, would be found to be linked to the Franklin story. Ultimately, the documentary focused on several limited aspects documented in this book, and developed them much more extensively than I ever had the resources or abilities to accomplish.

2. These areas which the documentary focused on, were:

(a) the use and involvement of Boys Town children and personalities in the Franklin Scandal, particularly Peter Citron and Larry King’s relationships to Boys Town;

(b) the linkage of Franklin to some of this country’s top politicians in Washington, and in the US Congress, with particular attention on those who attended parties held by Larry King at his Washington mansion on Embassy Row;

(c) the impropriety of these politicians and businessmen and compromising of these people by Larry King, through drugs and using children for pedophilia.

3. When the broadcast tape was sent to the United States, Customs officials seized the documentary and held it up as being ‘pornographic material’. Attorneys for Discovery Channel and Yorkshire TV were able to get the documentary released. Then, the lawyers went through the film for months, making this or that change or deletion, so that the documentary ultimately advertised to be shown on the Discovery Channel on May 3, 1994, would survive any claims of libel or slander that any of the individuals identified in the documentary might attempt to bring. The lawyers had cleared the documentary for broadcast.

4. During the several months that the documentary was being prepared and advertised for showing, major legislation impacting the entire future of the Cable TV industry was being debated on Capitol Hill. Legislation, which the industry opposed, was under debate for placing controls on the industry and the contents of what could be shown. Messages were delivered in no uncertain terms from key politicians involved in the Cable TV battle, that if the Conspiracy of Silence were shown on the Discovery Channel as planned, then the industry would probably lose the debate. An agreement was reached: Conspiracy of Silence was pulled, and with no rights for sale or broadcast by any other program; Yorkshire TV would be reimbursed for the costs of production, the Discovery Channel itself would never be linked to the documentary; and copies of Conspiracy of Silence would be destroyed.

Not all copies were destroyed, however, as I and some others received anonymously in the mail a copy of the nearly-finished product.

When the Discovery Channel program, Conspiracy of Silence, was being prepared, the British investigative team insisted that they would not go forward on the program unless they had the on-camera personal interview, and verification of Bill Colby himself, that John DeCamp was reporting the truth with respect to Franklin, and with respect to this book, The Franklin Cover-Up. Colby went on camera, and thoroughly shocked the Yorkshire TV team in how strongly he came out, risking himself, to support me and my work on Franklin.

Bill also wrote a letter to Attorney General Janet Reno, in which he strongly recommended that the Justice Department investigate this case from the standpoint I outlined in my book, a copy of which he enclosed with his letter. He got a formal response back from a Justice Department official, promising that the Department would indeed look into the case.

But then, Bill had always backed me up, right from the earliest days, beginning in Vietnam.