|
Behind the Gemstone Files |
|
The
Skeleton Key AUTHORSHIP ALPHA-1775 GEMSTONES A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P R S T U V W Y Z |
Who
is Jim Moore?
It was Moore's second time to spend a "vacation" behind bars at what became known as the "Riverside Hotel." The county jail was located on the banks of the meandering Harpeth River running through Franklin. The first time, he says he had to show up in court for some minor traffic violation and didn't have gas money to get to court, so he stopped by a local grocery store and bought $5 in gas, paying for it with a check on which he had signed his wife's name. The store was owned by one of the sheriff's deputies, and Moore was arrested and charged with forgery. "Fleming Williams himself went before the grand jury and tried his best to force my wife to testify against me. He couldn't, of course, and when the grand jury refused to indict me, he got extremely pissed off and swore in front of the grand jury he would take it over their heads. All over a $5 check that had long been made good. I spent maybe three or four days in jail waiting to go before the grand jury - and it drove me crazy. I hated being locked up." The second time, he says he got more used to it. He continued to make use of his newspaper contacts and, much to the dismay of the sheriff, received big bundles of mail from members of Congress, the Tennessee governor's office and organizations all over the country. "Fleming never opened the mail, probably because of who it was coming from, but it made him awfully nervous. Most of it was nothing but press releases. There were only two things I remember that were of a personal nature. Congressman Robin Beard had been sent some information from me about 'honey-combed' nuclear power plants. The foundations were riddled with big air pockets, according to the contractors, and they could not - and cannot to this day - withstand an earthquake. Beard had confirmed some of this and was sharing it with me. The other time, I got an invitation to Governor Ray Blanton's inauguration. I had to write him back that "due to circumstances beyond my control, I won't be able to attend.' "They didn't know I was in jail; I'd just had my mail forwarded. I used the backs of the press releases to keep a written diary of all the crap I witnessed in jail. One of Williams' deputies was writing an anti-drug column for a local newspaper, but the word was he was the biggest drug dealer in the county. One time they brought in a 16-year-old girl who had run away from home. Several deputies took their turns raping her. I could hear her screams back in my own cell block. The chief jailer was a drunk and would pass out in the hallway and piss all over himself. Food was being stolen and taken home by the deputies for their own use - steaks and such - while they were feeding us a starvation diet. It was a crooked f--king mess. I kept a diary of all these things, with names, dates and places. I realize it's not proof of anything, but after I got out, I sent Fleming some of the choicest items and told him not to ever f--k with me again or they would be made public. And he didn't." Hunger Strikes and Political Favors It was the food conditions that put Moore back in the public eye. He smuggled out a letter to County Judge Wilburn Kelley, who was chief executive of county government. The letter went into detail and was also sent to the local radio station where it was read over the air. Moore demanded an investigation and a face to face meeting with Kelley after he led a jail fast as a protest. "One day a bunch of us refused to get out of the truck until we got fed right. The guard, an old guy named Les, pulled out a pistol, stuck it inside the truck and started firing away. The truck was lined with sheet metal inside so bullets went ricocheting every which way. We couldn't get out of that truck fast enough and I'll never understand how no one was hurt. "Kelley showed up, and listened to several of us tell outr story. They would take us out on the road gang and work the hell out of us, with nothing to eat but a few crackers and a can of potted meat. They were taking all the good food home. After Kelley showed up, we started eating a lot better, but Williams' hatred for me just deepened. "What Fleming didn't know was that Kelley owed me one or two favors. He had been an elementary school principal in Fairview at a time a teacher had punished a 5th grade student for not turning in his homework. The student, who was subject to seizures, was taken to the front of the class and the teacher told all the boys in the class to hit him as hard as they could. I knew this because the kid was my brother-in-law. His mother, my mother-in-law, was furious. I went to Kelley and laid out the story. I think he was genuinely shocked. The teacher was an old woman close to retirement. Kelley promised me it would never happen again and on that promise I agreed not to print it. Besides, I was in a tough spot because of my own family ties to the case. My impartiality was something even I would have to call into question. "The second favor was when Kelley first ran for office. He was just a school teacher and a principal, not a politician, and he didn't know the first thing about running a campaign. He asked me for my help and I agreed to loan him some books to help him run a local campaign. He didn't want it known that he was associating with me, so he'd come over late at night and we'd discuss his campaign. He won and that's how he became County Judge." Shortly after the episode with Kelley and the local radio station, Moore was placed under a form of "mental torture" as he calls it. "They had this one deputy; he was huge, must have weighed 350 pounds. We called him Tiny behind his back. He'd come and stand in front of my cell for half an hour to an hour at a time, with his arms folded in front of him, just staring me down, never saying a word. It got to be pretty disconcerting. One day I asked one of the other deputies what the hell he was doing, and he said, 'Oh, Tiny? He's the one that's going to shoot you when you try to escape. They're going to take you for a ride and like a damned fool, you're going to try to run.' He shrugged and walked off. "If I was going to run, I would have done it my first week. They put a bunch of us in a work truck and loaded up a culvert pipe they were illegally putting on someone's private property, using jail labor to do it. Before we did that job, they drove the truck right down my road and passed my house on Walker Road just outside the Fairview city limits. I wanted so bad to just bolt and run. The back door of the truck was open because the culvert pipe was so long they couldn't close it. I bit my tongue and stayed. For all I knew, they were just tempting me and I wasn't going to take the bait. That was my first trip outside the jail." Tiny never made good on the shooting threat, Moore says, but the incident reminded him of the guy who had been shot in the back of the head execution-style with his hands handcuffed behind him. "I knew there was no way in hell I was gonna run; if they got me out of the squad car, they'd have to drag me out, kicking and cussing." He did his time and was released without ever having had a visitor or even a change of underwear or socks. "I had bought a hundred dollars or so of groceries and gave them to Barbara and the kids and asked her to at least bring me some underwear and socks and toothpaste, but she never did. Sometime before we divorced she had told me, 'If it's the last thing I do, I'm going to make the kids hate you.' Well, she succeeded." Re-opening the JFK Murder Probe After he got out of jail in February 1975 and returned to his rented home on Walker Road, which had electricity but no plumbing, he almost immediately got a job working for Vince Sorren in Chicago, where he had once worked on Consumer Confidential. The job didn't require him to move to Chicago, but allowed him to stay in Fairview and work from home. Consumer Confidential had long before folded, but Sorren was now publishing Modern People. Moore had one assignment: find out who killed JFK. "I dug out my old Bruce Roberts notes and some letters I had gotten from him since Watergate, and used that as the basis of some 26 to 30 articles I wrote for Modern People. I didn't have too much to really go on, so I had to retro-engineer my notes and see if I could corroborate any of it independently. Roberts had no documentation at all, and if he did, it didn't show up in any of my own handwritten notes." Moore says those spring days of 1975 were among the best in his life professionally. "I was getting paid to do what I loved doing, and I didn't even have to go to an office to do it. I wrote for several other magazines, including Pageant, and I was so lucky. Most of the time my first drafts sold for pretty decent money at the time; I didn't even have to do edits or rewrites. I had an old manual typewriter and I'd take it, a chair and a typing table and head to the creek on warm days and set it up right in the middle of the creek. It had a flat rock bottom and the water was just deep enough to cover my ankles, so I kept cool and had the best office a man could ask for." In February 1975, he contacted Rep. Henry Gonzalez (D-Texas), who was trying to re-open the JFK probe, and started supplying him with "Gemstone" information he had gotten from Roberts and on his own, dating back to his days at The National Insider. "I specifically named Onassis, as well as E. Howard Hunt and a list of names he should call as witnesses if he got his committee." In a four-page letter dated June
27, 1975, Moore named E Howard Hunt as being involved in a cover-up
in Mexico City involving Lee Harvey Oswald's alleged visits to the
Soviet and Cuban embassies there. He also pointed out to the
congressman that columnist Jack Anderson had also linked CIA agent
Gordon Novel, sought for testimony in the assassination, to a scheme
by Richard Nixon to erase the Watergate tapes and replace them with
forgeries. Moore and Gonzalez had been
corresponding since early February 1975, when Gonzalez, who had
ridden with Kennedy in that fateful motorcade in Dallas, was
single-handedly trying to revive the Kennedy probe. "I deeply appreciate your
suggestions," Gonzalez wrote on February 24. "If my
resolution is passed by the House and an investigative staff is set
up, your information would be helpful to them." Shortly after Moore sent Gonzalez
a copy of "A Skeleton Key to the Gemstone Files," Gonzalez
pounced on Moore's charge that E. Howard Hunt, the Watergate
mastermind, was possibly linked to Oswald "I didn't pay much attention
to investigators who repeatedly claimed there was a massive
conspiracy to cover up the JFK assassination," the Texas
congressman said. "But since Watergate, I
think these conspiracy claims should be viewed in a different
light." According to a report in The
National Enquirer, August 26, 1975: "A key question Gonzalez
wants answered is the whereabouts of Howard Hunt one of the major
Watergate figures - on the day of JFK's assassination." "I think it's more than
coincidence," Gonzalez said, "that Hunt had been head of
the CIA station in Mexico and that Lee Harvey Oswald made a
mysterious visit to Mexico City shortly before the assassination. "We again run into the name
of Howard Hunt in the attempt on Wallace's life, An hour after the
shooting, Hunt was sent to Arthur Bremer's apartment on Charles
Colson's orders." Colson was counsel to President Nixon. A few weeks later, on September
16, Gonzalez wrote Moore again: "I am deeply indebted to you
for the details which you have shared with me in respect to Gordon
Novel and other figures which you feel should be subpoenaed once the
investigation is under way. "Could you possibly verify
your statement that S. Howard Hunt was Chief of Station in Mexico
City at the time Oswald supposedly visited there? This is very
important, and I am wondering if you will let me have further
information in verification of this statement." The original claim, Moore says,
was made by Tad Szulc, a nationally-known and respected reporter
with the New York Times and an expert on national and international
intelligence operations. "I sent this to Gonzalez,
along with a more detailed report on Hunt which placed Hunt in
charge of the covert photography operation across the street from
the Soviet and Cuban embassies. The whole story that Oswald was in
Mexico City was a hoax. The CIA took photographs of everyone who
entered or left the buildings; this had been standard operating
procedure for months. The photo in the Warren Report is obviously
not Oswald and the CIA could never come up with a photo of Oswald
after that initial foul-up because they didn’t have any photos of
Oswald. Oswald had not been there." A few months later, Gonzalez
revealed that there was a $15,000 contract on his head and that the
FBI was reluctant to even investigate. Then, on March 7, 1977,
Gonzalez resigned as chairman of the House Select Committee on
Assassinations, claiming that "because vast and powerful
forces, including this country's most sophisticated crime element,
won't stand for it," the JFK probe would never be completed. "This criminal element is
all-pervasive, loaded with nothing but money and in many ways more
potent than the government itself." Forces allied against the probe,
he said, included "the Kennedy family and heavy business
interests in the Dallas-Fort Worth area who don't want all the old
JFK muck raked up." The committee investigation, he
said, was "a put-on job and a hideous farce that was never
intended to work." "They never did want the
Kennedy conspiracy unmasked. They were so right. The JFK probe is
over."
Gonzalez wrote the first article in the long Modern People series, based on his first-hand account of what happened that day as he rode in the Kennedy motorcade. Moore's disclosure of "Gemstone" material to Gonzalez and Modern People took place long before Stephanie Caruana claims to have written the Key in April 1975. (She has issued contradictory claims giving several different dates, including March, April, May and June 1975.) Vince Sorren sent Moore the money to rent a small one-room office on 7th Avenue North in downtown Nashville. This allowed him to spend more time in Nashville's Public Library a few blocks away to continue his research. "A lot of times I didn't get my checks on time, and had to go down to the Nashville Union Rescue Mission to eat. I often slept in the Nashville office on the floor. The Modern People series was my life; I ate it, breathed it, smelled it, slept it. You name it."
Bowart's 1st release of Operation
Mind Conrol was back in 1978. In an interview, in 1995 [ Richardson,
TX] Walter said, "It went into print and made it to the warehouses
(we think) a few made it to the book stores - I got paid
<chuckle> nice of them, to pay me for what they took." --
Then Mr. Bowart went on to other books and a life of a pretty hip
journalist - one of the few people that Frank Zappa gave an
interview to! Many say Bowart forgot more than most now know! Excerpts: http://home.att.net/~mcra/omc.htm In February, Bowart's Operation Mind Control hit the bookstores, in which he wrote "the claims of James L. Moore would sound fantastic were it not for the abundance of information to support the possibility of their validity." Moore described a process known as RHIC-EDOM (Radio Hypnotic Intra-cerebral Control - Electronic Dissolution of Memory), a form of brainwashing he claimed in his original Modern People article had been used in the Kennedy assassinations on Jack Ruby and Sirhan Sirhan. The article has since found its way into several other books, in bits and pieces. Bowart dropped out of sight after the book's publication and a promised sequel never fully materialized. Bowart has pretty much avoided publicity of any kind since. During this time, Moore made one visit to Chicago, his first since he had left in 1969. "I got there on the last flight before they shut down the airport for the biggest snowstorm in Chicago history," he recalls. "I took a cab that got lost, and he dropped me off on a street corner. I called the office and someone came and got me. We spent most of that night snowed in in a bar in Chicago, swapping stories and coming up with new headlines for one of the other papers. We got half soused and pigged out on pizza." He remembers that at the time there had been an elephant in the Chicago Zoo ("Ziggy, I think?") that had gone berserk. The snowed in staffers sat around drinking beer and coming up with increasingly wilder headlines for a story on Ziggy, the Killer Elephant. "They were all made up. A lot of the tabloid stuff is, but you have to know how to read them, how to discern the fake from the real. This is often the way the phony stories are born, over drinks." Back in Nashville, he met Marjy Plant, a local songwriter who later penned a tune for an Emmy Lou Harris album ("Wheels of Love") and with the five young women, he moved into a house off Nashville's West End Avenue (129 29th Ave. N.). He kept his Fairview home, since the rent was only $40 a month for the house and a 40-acre piece of land, and an absentee landlord, Lester Cheazam (sp?), who lived in Florida. Cheazam forewent the rent while Moore had been in jail and had even sent him cigarette money in jail. Executive Action It was during his stay in Nashville that Moore had his most bizarre experience while working with Congressman Gonzalez, an experience that led him to cut off contact, believing Gonzalez' probe had been infiltrated and was being sabotaged. "I was supposed to meet two investigators from Washington. It was odd; they said to meet them at the Belle Meade theatre. There was a movie playing there with Burt Lancaster about the Kennedy assassination - Executive Action. I showed up and didn't find anybody, so I stayed and watched the movie. On the way home, about maybe 10:30 or 11 pm, I was on West End Avenue, not far from the house, when this little sports car whizzes up behind me and rams me lightly from the back. I stopped in the middle of the street, and it whirled on around me, pulled a U-turn then came head-on towards me, just missing me. I gave chase and lost it on a side street. I did get a license number and when I called a local cop to run the plate, he called me back and said, 'I don't know what the hell you're involved in, but you don't want to mess with these guys. Officially, this plate doesn't exist. Unofficially, it belongs to some government spook agency, and there's no way I'm going to tell you who.' "Earlier that evening, someone had broken into the house and rifled through all of my files, scattering them all over the floor upstairs where my room was. All the women in the house were upset as hell. This old guy named Bob Turnbaugh, who had a crush on Marjy, wanted me to leave anyway, so as soon as the weather permitted, I returned to Fairview. I did get through to Gonzalez and told him my suspicions and he said he felt the same thing on his end. He said he thought he was under surveillance and was afraid someone was going to try to kill him before he could ever get the committee launched." Modern People was getting bored with the stories Moore was sending in, and wanted to move on to something else, "something lighter." After a few dozen articles, they pulled the plug and Moore found himself unemployed, living back in Fairview. "Maybe somebody even put pressure on them, I don't know - that's just speculation." During the mid-1970s, after getting out of jail and after the Modern People series was terminated, he worked at a Kruger or Kriger Gulf station on Elliston Place off West End and left just weeks before the owner was shot and killed in a robbery; three or four other employees were also shot and either killed or wounded. He worked at Bob Smithson's Gulf station in Hillsboro Village for some time, but says "it's hard for me to remember the exact sequence or time frames. I can remember a lot of specific incidents, but have trouble remembering what came first." He says he continued working on the assassination stories in his spare time, hoping to get another publication to pick up where Modern People had left off. Told that this inability to remember chronological events hurts his claim to the Keys, he says, "I know that, but that's just the way it is. The available documents just have to speak for themselves - probably better than my own memory." [NOTE: New documents have become available (old documents found, actually) that clarify some of the chronology, and these will be scanned in and posted. - Jim Moore] On May 1, 1975, he claims he finished the Gemstone outline while preparing his material for Rep. Gonzalez and what would become the House Select Committee on Assassinations. He says he also used it for his Modern People articles. While he was in Nashville, he claims his house in Fairview was ransacked and his Gemstone notes stolen. He says he cannot document this. "I was working with a friend, Burt Morgan and his brother Lawrence. There was a woman schoolteacher named Kay or Kaye (I can't remember her last name) who was dating Lawrence, or at least was wanting to, and she had a friend named 'Dallas'. I don't think that was his real name, but I was told he had been the one who stole the papers and was showing them around later to other people. "I had never heard of Stephanie Caruana and I'm sure she never heard of me, until 1985. I'd never heard of The City of Francisco tabloid where the Key was first published in August 1975, giving her credit for it."
Above is a three-page letter Moore wrote on November 17, 1976 to Congressman Henry Gonzalez (in response to his last letter above) outlining the names of people Moore thought Gonzalez should have subpoenaed in relation to the House Select Committee on Assassinations investigation of the Kennedy assassinations. (CLICK TO ENLARGE) He later tried to market it to Playboy, Penthouse and others, with no success. Back in Fairview, he lived off odd jobs and promoted local concerts, a series called "Country Pickin's." For a time in 1975-76 he lived with a Barbara Hackett in Nashville and was seen in Fairview driving a Mercedes (hers) during the concerts. And later, in 1976-77, he lived with another woman in Hickman County, Geraldine Warden, the sister of a friend. It was during this time that he tried to interest several men's magazines in publishing his Gemstone outlines, called A Skeleton Key to the Gemstone Files, which Stephanie Caruana claims was hers. His first documented contact with Larry Flynt and Hustler magazine is November 15, 1977, when he wrote Flynt a letter specifically mentioning "the Gemstone Files" by name. He offered to write a 12-part series, of which the Key was to be an outline of the individual stories to come. He got a risque Christmas card from Flynt, but no reply to his letter. In 1977, the Tennessee Senate voted, 18-14, to remove Appellate Court Judge Charles Galbreath for outrageous conduct, including a laudatory letter to Hustler magazine on court stationery, but not by the necessary two-thirds majority. (http://www.hermitage.com/tennpol.htm) On January 31, 1978, Flynt sent out a letter offering a "$1 million reward" for the solution to the JFK assassination. He sent one to Moore, along with a copy of the LA Free Press, which he had just purchased. "You may know that I have
offered a one-million dollar reward to those who help to bring
President Kennedy's killers to justice. Already we have received
hundreds of telephone calls and letters....Join us in this
effort." “My reaction was to get on the
phone to Hustler and to send the Gemstone so manuscript back again.
Maybe now, I thought, was a better time." Mark Lane, whose name is synonymous with conspiracy, JFK and Jim Jones, was Flynt's attorney. It was he who received Moore's article. Nashville attorney and former
criminal court of appeals judge Charles Galbreath, a personal friend
of Flynt's, later told Moore: "Mark Lane, with whom I am
associated in the James Earl Ray case here, was my house guest this
past weekend and I showed him the manuscript and he remembered
discussing it with Larry together with his plans to publish it last
year before Georgia. Mark told me he recommended against publication
because of the obvious speculative nature of the theories outlined
therein." Telephone records of South
Central Bell also show two long-distance conversations between
Fairview, Tennessee and Flynt's offices in Columbus, Ohio and
Beverly Hills, California on February 14 and 17. The first call,
placed at 12:58 p.m. and made from telephone number 615-799-2694,
was made to 614-464-2070 and lasted 13 minutes. The second call,
three minutes long, was made at 10:46 a.m. on February 17 from the
same number to 213-552-0012 in Beverly Hills. Both numbers are
listed to Larry Flynt's business interests. During these critical
negotiations over the publication of the Gemstone Files, another
victim of the Kennedy conspiracy was to fall -- this time Larry
Flynt himself. Flynt and his attorney Gene Reeves were gunned down
in Lawrenceville, Ga. by two or more unknown gunmen. Flynt hovered
near death with a gaping hole in his stomach; Reeves lay in critical
condition. Flynt has never walked since. A week later, Moore routinely
filed two letters, both of them mentioning his manuscript by name.
One was from author Mary McCarthy; the other was from author Tom
Miller. They would become critical pieces of evidence in the trial
that was to follow. On April 23, 1978, Mark Lane
reported that Flynt's million-dollar Reward offer had produced
important new evidence: "I now have a top-secret
document that is the single most important document uncovered since
the Kennedy assassination." That document was "A Skeleton
Key to the Gemstone Files.” Althea Flynt, Larry's wife, made
a statement that was to be repeated again and again in the coming
months: "My husband believes that it
was the CIA trying to silence him. And I believe it as well." Rampant rumors within the Flynt
organization were that the publisher had been shot because word had
leaked out about the Gemstone File. Suspicion focused on the
"former" CIA and FBI officials Flynt had hired to help
him, apparently forgetting a simple truth; once in the CIA, always
controlled by the CIA. Author Neal Wilgus, in his book
"The Illuminoids" also linked the two events in a listing
of news events of the year when he wrote: "-attempted assassination of
Hustler publisher Larry Flynt in Lawrenceville, Ga. after Flynt
announced a $1 million reward for new evidence in the JFK
assassination and released the so-called ‘Gemstone File' which
reportedly implicates government officials in the murder; Flynt's
attacker escapes unidentified and is still at large..." This account, published in book
form in March 1979, had to have been written either before the
shooting or just after. No one knew the Gemstone Files were going to
be published, despite the shooting. In fact, they were not published
until February 1979, when the magazine's cover proclaimed: "Exclusive! PRESIDENT KENNEDY'S KILLERS REVEALED!" An introduction to the article
never mentioned the possible link between it and Flynt’s
near-murder. Nor did it mention the name of the author ... or at
least not the true author. The story bore the byline of Bruce
Roberts, a man who had been dead for quite some time. "Fingering the heartless
forces responsible for the assassination of President John F.
Kennedy is a commitment HUSTLER made more than a year ago," the
introduction read. "As a result, we're bringing you a condensed
version of The Gemstone File, which was presented to us with the
following warning: 'Everyone else who has had this information is
now dead'- including its author, Bruce Roberts. While this
speculative report has been dismissed by some critics as an
‘amalgam of facts and apocrypha by a paranoid researcher who died
from an overdose of natural causes,' we'd like you to be the judge.
Roberts claimed to have been one of the crystallographers who
pioneered the development of artificial gemstones, later used in
laser research. Withdrawn and reclusive during his last years, he
accused the CIA of secretly injecting him with cancer cells shortly
before his death. The documents Roberts left behind - which in its
full form runs more than 1,000 pages - is possibly the most
comprehensive and frightening probe into the JFK killing to
date." Elsewhere, the publisher wrote: "Throughout his story,
whenever new voices become powerful and commanding, there is a
traceable pattern of violent response. Whether from the right or
from the left there is a stealthy, savage reaction, like a shaft of
ramrod steel. From Jesus Christ to Chile's Salvador Allende, the
markings are clear. Action calls forth reaction, and nowhere is this
more clear than in the savage history of our own country: Abraham
Lincoln, Huey Long, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Robert Kennedy and all
the others whose cries for justice have been s-tilled by the
staccato burst of the gun.... "The article that follows
... may be considered by many to be a work of madness. But remember,
through the ages all innovative work of genius has been thought to
be the product of insanity. One need only reflect on the spectacle
of Galileo recanting before the Church. It was madness - they said
for him to advance the notion that the earth moved around the sun.
And they were right; it wad madness, even though he was correct. The
astronomer’s thinking was madness because it upset the settled
scheme of things and could not be demonstrably proven for all to
see. For that reason, Galileo's idea had to be dismissed and done
away with perhaps, just like the Gemstone File....it should never be
overlooked that the hellish vision the article contains may well
bear the germs of truth, virulent though they may be. "The author of this article
is deceased. How he died is not known. "We do not presume to judge
the material that follows material we have obtained as a result of
our advertisements calling for information about the JFK
assassination....We consider only this: The Gemstone File is a cry
that needs to be heard. Whether or not your ears are deaf is a
matter for you alone to decide." When the article was published,
Moore went to Charles Galbreath, who had been forced off the
judicial bench because of a letter he had written to Flynt's
magazine on official court stationery upholding Flynt's freedom of
speech. Galbreath asked Moore to meet him at his home, where he
agreed to act as intermediary. "I was unable to contact
Flynt," Moore recalls, "I oouldn't get through the lower
levels. I was being blocked. So I went to Galbreath.” "I agree," Galtreath
wrote in a letter of February 7, 1979, "that the evidence of
plagiarism from the misspelled word (Moore had deliberately
misspelled the name of a top Vatican figure and Hustler had
unknowingly copied and reproduced the error when it copied the
manuscript) is conclusive. There is no doubt that Hustler will
recognize its obligation to you for the unauthorized use of the
material." Ironically, correspondence
between Galbreath and Flynt began disappearing from the judge's
files at about the same time. Later, Galbreath added that
"I have no doubt that Larry Flynt will be fair. He has always
impressed me that way and I have talked to him enough since his
injury to believe he has not changed." James Heinisch, representing
Hustler, agreed that the article had been plagiarized and an offer
of $2,500 was made through Galbreath. Moore, citing the original
proposal of November 15, 1977 and the million-dollar reward offer,
turned the settlement down, noting that he had spent 15 years of his
life researching the Gemstone Files. Meanwhile, publication of the
manuscript had created a storm of controversy. Gallery publisher Nils A. Shapiro
sharply criticized Flynt's decision to publish it: "It's unfortunate that so
many publications have, in the years since 1963, attempted to cash
in on public interest by 'sensationalizing' and exaggerating their
reporting of the assassination case. The February issue of Hustler
magazine states boldly (and misleadingly) on its front cover:
"Exclusive! President Kennedy's Killers Revealed!" Gallery
would have liked nothing better than to have this be true - whether
the news came from Hustler or Newsweek or NBC. Unfortunately, the
poor suckers who bought copies of that issue quickly learned that
the article inside was very likely a work of fantasy; even the
magazine's own introduction was careful to point out that the piece
may have had no validity whatsoever, contained no documented proof,
and was probably nothing more than the 'speculation' of one man who
'claimed through his inventions in the field of artificial gemstone
technology (the cornerstone of laser beam application)...he became
privy to worlds that can just barely be imagined, let alone glimpsed
by ordinary mortals.' "That front-cover line may
have sold a lot of copies of Hustler, but it was a black mark in the
field of serious investigative research...." Not everyone who read the article
felt "suckered," however. The April 1979 issue of Hustler
contains two sobering letters from readers: "Whoever Bruce Roberts was,
he told more truth in the February 1979’s Hustler than anyone else
ever has about what's going on at the top of our government. I hope
it awakens the voters." (Signed James Montgomery, Oronogo,
Mississippi) "I bought your February
issue and found my worst nightmare exploding right out of your pages
in The Gemstone File expose. Needless to say, I am afraid, hopeless
- but even worse, uninformed. I've talked to friends and have tried
to tell them what I read in your magazine. They don't want to hear
about it. One friend said, 'Why, if everybody knew about what really
happened, we would lose faith in the American way." (Name and
address withheld by request) Reflecting on the Gemstone
revelations, Moore says: "Of course it was
speculative! What they received was just a summary. I couldn't very
well send them three file cabinets dull of documents, letters,
photos, etc. What they published was just a proposal to publish a
12-part series - fully documented with photographs of the JFK gunmen
- there were four of them - and government documents detailing what
really happened. There just wasn't room in one article. But they
printed it anyway, and I think that
decision played right into the hands of the CIA. It was an
opportunity from the very pits of hell (I can't bring myself to say
heaven-sent) to pounce on the truth and totally discredit it. Now
that the CIA is even pushing the story as a book and a movie, it's
obvious! "But America is going to
pay, and pay dearly. Sadly, the people responsible will be dead by
then; it will be the people of this country who have to pay ... in
oil prices, in inflation, in CIA control of the country, and,
finally, in nuclear war. He points to the lyrics of a
Rolling Stones song: "Who killed the Kennedys? After all, it
was you and me" and claims that the apathy Americans hold for
their government is ultimately responsible. "You can't give away the
right of your own destiny, and we've done that in this country. For
a very brief period, there was an effort by the people to regain
control, but they failed and now the Mafia-CIA is stronger than
ever. Do you realize we are living Orwell's 1984?" In March or April 1979, Moore began publishing another Fairview newspaper, in partnership with a Gil Atlee. The first issue contained an introduction to the Gemstone Files. A second issue was never published. Instead, Moore was again arrested and thrown in jail. It's Back to Jail We Go "Gil Atlee was CIA," Moore says. "He showed up at my door one day and wanted to know all about my work. I generally am pretty relaxed with people until I have reason to believe otherwise. Gil and I actually went into business together. He told me his father had been in the agency in Greece and had been thrown out because of his drinking and getting in a fight with another agent over a woman there. I don't know much of it is true, but I came to the conclusion that Gil had been sent to kill me. The last time I saw him, he was in the office with a gun to my head ranting and raving about what a traitorous son-of-a-bitch I was and how I was letting a woman (Geraldine) ruin our business relationship. Geraldine had some family problems I was trying to help her work out and, yes, it took a lot of time." He and Geraldine separated after her daughter, Robbie, eloped and got married. She and her boyfriend-bodyguard, Johnny Hoskins, had confided their plans to Moore on the condition he not tell anyone. "They swore me to secrecy before telling me their secret. Geraldine was enraged at me for not stopping them, but that's a long story, Some years later, Robbie went out in the back yard, crawled into a van and shot herself to death. I didn't learn about that until many years later." Within a few weeks of the split-up, Moore was arrested where he was living in Fernvale, between Fairview and Franklin. "I was living in Rick McNeese's old house - he had gone to California. I was in the middle of all that mess with Flynt and Charles Galbreath and I had gone to Nashville for the weekend with Marjy Plant. I came back Monday morning, parked the car, got a bar of soap and a towel and headed to the creek for a bath. "While I was down there, this squad car pulls up in the driveway and three or four deputies start piling out. One of them was Rick Easley, who's dead now. He reached into the back and got out three potted plant and set them on my porch. Then, they knocked on the door. I was curious and just stayed where I was, and heard Easley say, 'I want the first shot at him.' What they had put on the porch were pot plants. Now the porch wasn't 20 feet from the road. If I'm going to grow pot, I'm not stupid enough to put it on the damned front porch 20 feet from the street." He watched from his hidden vantage point across the road by the Little Harpeth River as the three deputies walked around the house, then went inside. One of them, he says, reached into his [Moore's] car and removed the keys from the ignition. "They knew I was around, because the keys were in the car, but they couldn't find me. I kept hidden for hours as they drove back and forth about every ten minutes. One squad car would come from one direction, and another would come from the other direction. "I bellied my way through the grass and positioned myself in back on a hill overlooking the house. I stayed there until dusk, then snuck into the house and grabbed a change of clothes and set out on foot for a friend's house several miles down the road. They weren't home so I sat out on their porch for hours. Every few minutes the phone would ring, and I found out later the police had a list of all my known associates and was calling them constantly to see if any of them knew where I was. "I guess it was about midnight that Jimmie and Suzanne came home and we went inside. The first thing he did was roll up a few joints. Almost immediately, there was a loud banging on the door. I knew who it would be. I reached across and slipped the joints into my pocket so they wouldn't get in trouble. I already was and didn't have a whole lot to lose. They threw me into the back of a squad car and hauled me to Franklin. They never emptied my pockets and one of the first things I did after I was locked up and the lights went out was fire up the doobie. And yes, I inhaled - long and deep. "Judge Ann Franks released me on my own recognizance, but the deputies took me back to jail and lied to her, telling her they'd released me. While I was in jail, Rick McNeese's mom, my landlady, showed up to visit me and told me that men in suits had been going through the house. She said she had tried to file a burglary complaint, but the sheriff ignored her. She said she had gone down to the house to confront the men, and one of them told her, 'If you value the lives of your family, you'll get your ass back up the hill and keep your mouth shut.' I sent the judge a letter - before this - telling her I was being held illegally and that the reason was the Gemstone Files. I told her my house would probably be burglarized and that there were sensitive political documents there that could place the lives of several important people in danger. I didn't tell her one of those people was Senator Howard Baker, who had been helping me track down some information on Hal Lipset, a prominent figure in the Gemstone Files. He had been the first person hired by the Watergate committee, of which Baker had been a prominent member. When they found out how deeply involved he was in Watergate itself, they had to dismiss him. Hal Lipset is a legend. Movies, books and TV series have been made about him. I think I still have, in a safe place, some of the Lipset material Baker sent me. "A few days later, they hauled me to Fairview City Court where they said I had been charged with stealing some tires. The owner of the truck supposed to have been involved, Jimmy Clark, told me in 2001 he'd never known a thing about it and had no idea how I was charged. He said that was the first he'd ever heard of it - some 20 plus years later. "Fairview City Court said there was no evidence I'd done anything and dismissed the case. I sat there and waited and waited because the county deputies were supposed to come back and get me. The police chief, A. A. Moore [no relation], finally looked at me and said, 'Look, get the hell out of here. I don't know what's going on, but I'll be damned if I'm going to do their dirty work for them. You're free to go.' So I went! "I went to Nashville and 'hid out' with Marjy Plant until my court date. I walked into the courtroom and Fleming Williams had a damned fit, wanted to charge me with escape. The judge wouldn't let him and this time made sure I was freed. I don't remember if the charges against me were dropped or if I was just sentenced to time served. There are no longer any records of it that I know." One of the people "in suits" going through his house was a man named Stanley E. King, grand titan of the Ku Klux Klan in Tennessee and a former Nashville cop. The others, according to King - by Moore's account - were state and federal agents, sent to clean out all the Gemstone material they could find. King himself told Moore's second wife, Trina, the story on Feb. 2, 1981 just days before a scheduled hearing in Moore's lawsuit against Flynt and Hustler. When the checks didn't come and he couldn't pay the rent, he moved to another, cheaper office on Church Street in 1980 overlooking the Nashville freeway, in the same building as the local AAA. It was there that he met Larry DeWane, a local attorney who had been in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963 working for the Dallas Morning News. Moore met DeWane in the hallway one day and they struck up a conversation. After Moore told DeWane what he was doing, the two became friends and shared a lot of experiences. "Mostly he talked, and I listened," Moore says. "He'd been there and lived it while I had just been a college freshman that day." "Trina worked at a bar doing cleanup in the mornings," Moore says. "We lived in East Nashville at that time. King and a lot of cops hung out at the bar. He gave Trina two of his business cards - one for the Klan and one for his security business - and told her something to the effect, 'I understand your husband is supposed to go to court tomorrow. I think you're probably good people and I just want to warn you he's a dead man if he shows up.' Trina didn't even know I was scheduled for a hearing. I'd kept it very tightly under wraps and the only person I'd discussed it with was my lawyer friend, Larry DeWane, in my own office on Church Street. I don't think Larry spilled the story, though. I think my office was bugged. King told Trina the story of what had happened in Fairview and said he had been there. He seemed to know an awful lot about the events from that day not to have been. Well, Trina freaked out and started calling all over town to find me and warn me." He says he did not pursue the lawsuit because (a) his lawyer disappeared and (b) he was afraid for his family's safety. "A lot of the Gemstone had been cleaned out by the 'suits'. I later learned that King's lawyer was Charles Galbreath, who was also my lawyer, supposedly. Among the documents removed were letters from Galbreath. I've always that was more than just coincidence." "It was one thing to put myself at risk. It was something else to put Trina and her kids at risk. I thought it better to concede the battle and perhaps come back later and win the war." A more detailed and footnoted account of this saga can be found in "One Man's War With the CIA", which appeared on the Internet in 1984 or so. It is probably presented in a more chronological order than the account by Moore printed here, and fills in some gaps. On October 1, 1979, sometime before the incident described above and shortly after he left Fairview and the Williamson County Jail, Moore showed up as editor of The Mid-State Observer, a black weekly newspaper in Nashville owned by Sam Latham. An article in that week's issue mentioned the Gemstone Files and noted that he had been arrested and jailed in the summer of 1979 "on phony drug charges" later dismissed. In the 1980s he worked at The Paper Shop, a paper store for printers owned by Sloan Paper Company, then worked as warehouse manager before moving to Dennis Paper Store as manager of their retail operation. It was while there that he had a heart attack and ended up in Vanderbilt Hospital. When he got out, he found out he'd been fired and replaced by his assistant manager. While working at Dennis Paper Store, Moore said he was approached one day by a guy who said he wanted to buy some paper for a ham radio newsletter. "I walked the guy to the back where we started looking at paper stock, and all of a sudden he said, 'I'm not here to buy paper. I'm here to give you a warning.' This guy was the only civilian working in an ultra-secret communications facility on this high hill overlooking Nashville, just south of Belmont College. It was the state communications center in case of any state or national emergency, and it was surrounded by a high wire fence and had security cameras that could read license plates up to several miles away, according tothe state emergency management agency director. "We lived just across the street from this tower and I would often find myself sitting at the kitchen table drinking my morning coffee and watching this camera watching me back. They could rotate it and manipulate it, so it could even follow my movements when I walked outside. I had printed a story about it, and asked the mayor by whose authority was this community-wide surveillance being carried out. One day we got their elevator permit in our mailbox by mistake; the place goes seven stories underground and they can spy on all of Nashville with those cameras and the big array of antenna that stick out all over the tower. "This man from the facility, who I won't name, told me my article and letter had raised a stink, and that there was a 'thick dossier' going around on me at the facility. He said he had seen it and proceeded to tell me some of the things that were in it - things that had some basis in fact but had been twisted into something else. That's when I knew for certain I was under surveillance." Moore acknowledges that some of the dates herein may be inaccurate, since he was relying on his memory. As documents become available that will clarify those, corrections will be made. |
"As
crazy it sounds, I met some really nice guys in jail. Most of
them were just kids barely out of their teens, busted for some
minor pot infraction."
