A MadCowMorningNews investigation into allegations that “Mars & Venus” author John Gray and Saudi Billionaire Adnan Khashoggi’s bankrupt GenesisIntermedia.com has been used in an effort to spread disinformation about the 9/11 attack on the Internet uncovered evidence last week that the firm had numerous underworld connections.
Testimony in an extortion trial in Tampa, Florida, the MadCowMorningNews learned exclusively, fingered Michael Muzio, President of Genesis subsidiary www.opendoormusic.com as the intended victim of a Mafia hit ordered by a business associate, Joseph Forlizzo of Queens.
While the court transcripts offered no explanation for why Forlizzo believed Genesis exec Muzio ‘had it coming,’ when Officers of public companies need key man insurance against the prospect of being rubbed out it can be bad for business.
Meanwhile the controversy continued over the hugely-successful self-help guru’s funding of the recent International Citizen’s Inquiry into the 9/11 attack, even as he finds himself drawn in with his erstwhile partner in a growing financial scandal beginning to unspool in courtrooms across the country.
“The ‘C’Mon Back’ Scandal”
Dubbed “Stockgate” by business journalists, it involves massive looting and financial fraud, on a scale not seen since… well, since the last bout of massive looting and financial fraud in America, which informed sources indicate took place “not that damn long ago.”
The massive lawsuit was filed under the RICO racketeering statues in Federal Court in Minneapolis, and cites Gray for allegedly allowing use of his trading account in furtherance of the scam, which netted more than $100 million.
Despite the huge sum involved, the scandal at GenesisIntermedia is but a piece in a larger mosaic of dozens of companies being systematically looted by people recently characterized in Jack Anderson’s column as “criminals, money launderers and terrorists.”
For whatever reason, associates of Gray & Khashoggi apparently feel they belong to a charmed circle of people that fiscal watchdogs in the U.S. have given the ‘high sign’ to “back up a truck.”
“The One-Two Punch of Love”
Even as one of the best-selling authors of all time continues to spread money around to 9/11 ‘Truth Movement” principals, a business partner continues to pursue his lawsuit against one of only a few investigative journalists challenging the government’s official story with eyewitness evidence. Wow. How unlucky is that? Is it just a coincidence?
The answer is almost too obvious for words. No one was bothering to hide the pathetic flailing-about of third-rate scrubs denied more glamorous employment in their chosen field.
John Gray also has strange and so-far unexplained connections to two Middle Eastern men “of interest” in the 9/11 investigation, both of whom reside in San Diego.
The first is a Saudi Professor who housed two of the hijackers, cited recently by Senator Bob Graham, Chairman of the Joint Congressional Intelligence Committee Hearings, as evidence of involvement in the attack by people working for the government of Saudi Arabia.
The second is an Iranian exile, running a network used to infiltrate hundreds of Middle Eastern men illegally into the United States, according to court documents. And it is likely that the Saudi Professor also belongs to this ring. Consider the following:
Until moving to California Iranian Sam Koutchesfahani had been a retainer to the Shah. He’s been one busy expatriate ever since. Faster than you can say “Savak” he was running a network used to infiltrate Middle Eastern men into the U.S., while also finding time to hang out with the Heaven’s Gate cultists, 39 of whom died in his mansion in the wealthy San Diego suburb of Rancho Santa Fe, in March of 1997.
“Can’t we see the replay before we decide?
Is it coincidence that a man running a ring slipping Middle Eastern men into the U.S. also rented out a ‘safe house’ to cultists ramping up for a launch towards Hale Bopp and the Level Above Human?
We know what they’d say on NFL Sunday: “You make the call.”
But anyway you slice it, its a small world. Even John Gray knew cult leader Marshall Applewhite, apparently, back in Houston, Texas. where both lived in the 60’s and 70’s. Even the Heaven’s Gate cult’s Internet Service Provider may have links to Khashoggi’s fine family’ of companies, all of whom carry the code word Genesis in their name. We call them, collectively, “Saudi Genesis.”
Our mind protested the conclusion staring us in the face. After all, John Gray is the best selling author in the Solar System, responsible for annual revenues totaling more than the budgets of countries with seats at the United Nations.
He would certainly have been heavily scrutinized by dozens of journalists. If he knew the dopey Applewhite, wouldn’t it have surfaced before now?
Similarly, the Heaven’s Gate cult was the news for several weeks when it occurred seven years ago. What could remain hidden after that kind of media attention?
Apparently…a lot.
“It’s like Iowa, but with a beach.”
But first, here’s a brief introduction into the intrigue we will soon see swirling in San Diego…
The clue which would eventually lead to a ‘protected’ network came from researcher Kelly Cooke http://researched.blogspot.com/ who tipped us to a man we’d never heard of before, Sam Koutchesfahani.
While it was our first exposure to Koutchesfahani, TV news crews had made his mansion so recognizable after the Heaven’s Gate mass suicide that neighbors voted to change the name of their street to deter lookie-loos.
Sam, too, we discovered, has since changed his name.
Sam is from an Iranian family close to the Shah of Iran, stated wire service reports. He’d moved to San Diego after the Shah was deposed. Sam’s San Diego network, we learned, paid bribes to dozens of college and university instructors for bogus student transcripts then used to help insert hundreds of middle eastern men, most of whom were anything but students, into the U.S. under the guise that they were.
Sam and the Unnamed Saudi were clearly both in the same business. A connection seems obvious. The flying school patronized by the San Diego terrorists, for example, was run by another Iranian exile, Fereidoun Sorbi.
Has this not occurred to the FBI? They’ve said nothing about the network, so it appears they’ve “overlooked” it in their “massive” investigation into the biggest crime in US history. Another case of FBI bungling?
No, unfortunately. The silence owes something to the fact both men were the FBI’s “own.”
Like Rudi Dekkers, both Saudi Professor Abdussattar Shaikh and Iranian ‘facilitator’ Sam Koutchesfahani were confidential informants for the FBI’s San Diego office. And “colleagues” of the Professor were named in court documents as having been paid off by Koutchesfahani. The 9/11 Commission Report hinted the two hijackers living with the Saudi Professor arrived via this connection.
But there’s more… The Saudi “Professor,” now retired, taught at a bogus “University” in San Diego, we discovered, run by the same people who awarded “Dr.” John Gray” his—we almost said bogus but stopped ourselves—his much-disputed “PhD.”
How amazing is that? Saudi “Professor” Abdussattar Shaikh is so well protected by the Bush Administration that they wouldn’t even let the FBI serve a subpoena to compel his testimony before the Intelligence Committee investigation into the 9/11 attack, even though it was the only subpoena issued by the congressional inquiry.
The Senate Intelligence Committee would have had better luck calling the “Make A Wish” Foundation.
“That was a smoking gun,” Graham said, although inexplicably no one in the media was paying him any attention. “The reason for this cover-up goes right to the White House.”
“You’re not cleared for any of that information.”
We were entering territory considered “too sensitive” for the American people to know about. We were mucking around on the edges of the 27 blank pages in the Congressional Intelligence Report.
It was all very “Hush Hush.”For example,while the Saudi Professor’s case is discussed in the text of the 9/11 Commission Report, he is not mentioned once by name.
“Hamzi and Midhar finally found a room to rent in the house of ‘an individual’ that they met at a mosque in San Diego,” the report says. “According to the ‘homeowner’…
The 9/11 Commission report of this story sets a new record, we realized while reading it, for most lies packed into a single sentence in a government document. A high degree of difficulty was involved. Its like participating in a “record drug bust in Florida.”
There’s a lot of stiff competition for the title.
“The housemate who rented the room to Hazmi and Mihddar (two of the 19 hijackers) is an apparently law-abiding citizen,” lied the report, “with long-standing friendly contacts among local police and FBI personnel….who saw nothing unusual in (their) behavior to prompt him to report to his law enforcement contacts.”
FBI counter intelligence informant Abdussattar Shaikh hosted two of the hijackers while providing more than enough information for San Diego field agents to request an investigation.
But FBI headquarters refused the plea from a San Diego FBI agent to investigate the two hijackers-in-training. They increasingly seem to us to have been operating on some other agenda which has not yet been fully explained to the American people. Because incompetence only cuts it as an explanation for so long.
At some point questions of the FBI’s “motive” must begin to be asked. .
A comet, sure! But with a spaceship in its tail!
Is there anything about author Gray, other than his association with Khashoggi, which suggests his truthfulness might be in question?
Biographies of Gray have him being born in Houston, Texas, in, variously, 1950, 1951, or 1952.
After high school he attended St. Thomas University and the University of Texas before “hooking up” with the Maharishi.
Thus Khashoggi (whose family of cultists will be covered later) and Gray both have backgrounds which fit nicely with last week’s theme of “cultish involvement” in a 9/11 “Truth Movement” chock-full of people who sometimes slip and say “data crystal” when they mean “diskette.”
A profile of Gray called “TOWER OF PSYCHOBABBLE; HEALER OR HUCKSTER?” in TIME magazine revealed that the cult’s guru, Marshall Applewhite, had known John Gray’s mother, who owned of a New Age bookstore in Applewhite’s adopted hometown of Houston.
Gray fired off a letter of protest to TIME making the point that anyone who ever walked into her bookstore could be said to have “known” his mother. But conspicuously absent in Gray’s angry letter to the editor were any indications that Gray himself might have known Applewhite, a dead ringer for My Favorite Martian.
John Gray was a student at the tiny University of Saint Thomas in Houston, we discovered, while Applewhite was teaching there and becoming embroiled in a messy scandal involving a homosexual affair with one of his students.
“Born in Houston, Texas, in 1951, after high school Gray attended St. Thomas University and the University of Texas,” begins Gray’s author biography. Curiously, his most recent bios leap right past this sticky wicket entirely, going from his being awarded a high school diploma—the only undisputed educational credential he apparently possesses—to his nine years as private secretary to the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, where he became one of the first TM’ers to ‘fly’ (read: bounce) during meditation.
A total psychic re-construct
Enter Marshall Applewhite, complete with his trademark weird beady eyes. Two strands most stories highlighted about Applewhite were his conventional religious background and his torment about his homosexuality.
“The University of St. Thomas in Houston hired him as an associate professor in 1966. He became a driving force behind the university-sponsored Houston Festival Chorus and at one time was head of the music department,” said The Toronto Sun.
“St. Thomas fired Applewhite in 1970 for what the college called “health problems of a mental nature,” reported a Houston Chronicle story headlined “Leader was recruited here; Nurse told him God had kept him alive.”
Gray was a student while Applewhite was getting into trouble rubbing male students the wrong way. A call to the University of St Thomas’s Admissions Office in Houston elicited information that there were only a few hundred students at the school at the time. So Gray and Applewhite almost certainly knew each other, during what was a bad time for at least one of them.
“His particular crisis came in 1970, when university administrators learned Applewhite was in a relationship with a male student and asked him to leave,” read one local news account.
“The firing followed a homosexual affair he had with a student,” said the Washington Post. “Suffering from depression and shame, hearing “voices” (Applewhite) then checked into a hospital, asking to be “cured” of his homosexual desires,” reported the Post.
Marshall Applewhite fled to a psychiatric hospital in such disgrace that he must have felt only a total psychic makeover would do. During psychiatric re-programming he became involved with a New Age nurse and amateur astrologer named Bonnie Nettles. They “bonded.”
Maybe Applewhite saw her as offering a way out. Maybe Nurse Betty said, “Look into my eyes.”
There were no “maybe’s about the result. The result was Heaven’s Gate.
“Hot pants in Heaven”
“My mother was involved with all of this back in the early ’70s when it all started — back when I was just a kid, 12 years old,” said Bonnie Nettle’s son after the Heaven’s Gate mass suicide.
He remembered a gathering at Applewhite’s Montrose-area residence: “He had some people over there, and I noticed they were kind of strange. Some of the guys wore makeup, hot pants, a lot of weird things. And I didn’t know what a gay person was.”
So the re-programming may not have been totally successful..
Straight guys only rarely wear hot pants.
In an apparently unrelated development Gray left Houston at about the same time for Switzerland, where he became—for the next nine years–the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s private secretary. Two separate lives intersected at a tiny Catholic college before spinning off in bizarrely unexpected directions for both men.
This is probably just a coincidence.
But what happened next had nothing to do with coincidence whatever. There was clearly something in the mental conditioning Marshall Applewhite received at Bellaire Hospital in Houston, where he also completely adopted Nurse Betty’s science fiction-cum-Christianity fantasies, that set poor gay Marshall Applewhite onto his tragic course to immortality as the answer to a question in Trivial Pursuits.
Despite this obvious conclusion, in the millions of words written about the cult in the wake of their mass suicide, we could find not one news report that even raised the question. Mass cult suicides apparently don’t raise eyebrows anymore, or questions of possible brainwashing or mental programming.
Wow. We were shocked. Shocked! So we decided to commit journalism. What the hell, we figured…
We could always raise bail.
“Break on through to the other side.”
We come now to the defining episode, apparently, in John Gray’s life. He describes it often, in interviews, in seminars and in his infomercials. It concerns the death of his father, and when we first heard the story it sounded too weird to be true. So we checked it out.
Guess what? It is too weird to be true.
Gray grew up in the well-to-do River Oaks section of Houston, Texas…
John was “one of seven children of a well-to-do oil executive who died in 1985 after hitchhikers robbed him and locked him in the trunk of his car. His mother ran a spiritual bookshop and knew Heaven’s Gate cultist Marshall Applewhite,” says the TIME profile Gray found offensive.
Here’s the story from a sympathetic newspaper profile in the Dallas Morning News:
“It was 1985, and Gray had just gotten remarried. He and his bride, Bonnie, were honeymooning in Canada when he got an urgent phone call from his mother in Houston. His father, David Thomas Gray, had been found dead in the trunk of his car.
A retired oil executive, David Gray was a good Samaritan who enjoyed doing charity work. He also had a habit of giving rides to hitchhikers. One stifling hot day in July, as David Gray drove to Nacogdoches to visit relatives, he picked up a couple of hitchhikers.
“They robbed him and left him in the trunk,” John Gray says. “I guess they thought he might chase them. He wouldn’t have. He’d been happy to give his money to them, and he did.”
Someone, perhaps one of the hitchhikers, placed an anonymous call to police to report the abandoned car. “But the police didn’t get the directions right,” John Gray says.
Finally, Virginia Gray called police when her husband didn’t show up in Nacogdoches. “She described the car, and they found it, and he was dead in his trunk. He died of heat asphyxiation in the Texas sun. He cooked in there. It was very traumatic.”
As the family gathered in Houston for the funeral, John Gray acted on an unusual impulse. “I wanted to get into the car and see what happened. It just sounded so horrible.”
“He crawled into the trunk and closed the lid,” reported the paper. “He could see where his father had taken a screwdriver and banged on the hood. He also noticed that the tail light had been pried open, apparently for air. John Gray pushed his hand through the opening.”
“My brother said, ‘See if you can reach the button from there.’ I went outside with my hand and reached around to the button and opened the trunk.”
John Gray’s face betrays only a trace of irony. “So that was another layer in the whole thing. He could have reached the button and let himself out. He wasn’t a stupid guy _ I’m not a stupid guy. But when you’re inside the trunk, you’re panicking and trying to get out, you don’t think about how you would get in. You have to have a different perspective to see that.”
It was as if his father had left him one last valuable lesson, he says. “And that was, there are so many problems in this world where people are locked in trunks, and they just need a different perspective. You need to go on that other side to solve the problem.
“And that’s kind of what I feel I’ve done with ‘Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus’.
“I’ll paint any car for $39.95!”
A Gray associate’s website drives home the sales pitch. “If only their father had thought of this, he would still be alive,” wrote Kathy Gates, Professional Life Coach, at www.reallifecoach.com
“But it took his brother on the outside to notice the button. The lesson? Sometimes you have to step outside the situation you feel trapped in to see that you’re not trapped after all.”
Even leaving aside for a moment the horrible tackiness of using the death of your father as part of your sales pitch, we had some problems with this. So we began to make inquiries.
We learned that the incident had happened in Nacogdoches, Texas, a small town thirty miles outside the middle of nowhere. Robbie Goodrich, the editor of the local paper, remembered it vaguely.
“I don’t remember too many details. I remember the police never did classify the death as a homicide. He was somebody that liked to put himself in strange situations or something.”
Robbie kindly dug through the paper’s computerized files, and found a story about Strange Deaths and Unsolved Murders in Nacogdoches County.
“David Thomas Gray — July 5, 1985 — “Gray’s body was found in the trunk of his 1973 Mercedes off U.S. Hwy, 59 south of Nacogdoches,” stated the story, which ran on July 12, 2004.
“The death was ruled accidental, as Gray evidently died from asphyxia due to suffocation and heat exhaustion. Family members said Gray had gotten into his trunk before just to see if he could get out.”
Well now. This was curious, and warranted further investigation.
A guy gets carjacked, locked into a car trunk, and dies of asphyxiation… And the death’s not ruled a homicide. Hmm. A few phone calls later we were speaking with former Sheriff Joe Evans, who had worked on the case.
“None of that would be true.”
“He died in the trunk of his BMW, that’s right,” he told us. “He was rich and had retired, and supposedly spent all his time pretty much driving aimlessly around. According to the family he’d locked himself in the trunk before, just to see if you could get out,” Evans stated.
So he hadn’t been carjacked?
“He was not robbed,” Evans said. “He had all his credit cards, his wallet, and plenty of cash when we found him. So robbery was not a motive.”
Don’t carjackers usually rob their victims?
“The case has always puzzled me,” he admitted. “You could see the family were all highly intelligent and very well-educated. But they were really strange. It seemed like they all had completely different lifestyles, and there was no cohesiveness, they seemed to be all going off in different directions. It was the most dysfunctional family I’ve ever seen.”
We told the Sheriff the outlines of the story Gray tells, about his dad being a good Samaritan and getting carjacked, and the police not being able to follow directions and get to the car in time.
“None of that would be true,” he said slowly.
So what did happen?
Sheriff Evans said he didn’t know. “We know what his movements were. He’d visited someone here, stopped at an ATM, got gas and a quart of oil. One family member made the comment that it was typical of his father to have done something like this, lock himself in a trunk. So in the absence of any evidence to the contrary, the death was ruled accidental. But what he did has never made sense to me.”
When a homicide detective in Houston drove out to the mother’s Aquarian Age Bookstore to relay the news that her husband had been found dead, Sheriff Evans relayed, he found her reaction strange.
“She was having a meeting in the bookstore, and when the detective said her husband had been found dead, she asked him if he could come back later, after her meeting was over. The detective told me he said: ‘that’s not the way it worked.’”
The death remains a mystery. Before hanging up, the Sheriff asked us to get in touch with him if we found anything out.
Karma Chameleons in the CIA
“You know, in a lot of unsolved cases, we’re still in touch with the family years later, because for them there’s no closure. But they seemed like they just wanted to pick up the body and forget about it. Its not like they were calling us all the time wondering if we’d found any leads.”
Then we discovered a statement about John Grays’ father made recently by Canadian talk host Barrie Zwicker to researcher Brian Salter. Zwicker is reportedly in business with Gray, making him a seemingly credible source.
Apparently there has been some talk that David Gray had worked for the CIA.
“John has a personal life history which I think helps explain why he would become a 9/11 skeptic,” wrote Zwicker. “He has reason to be deeply suspicious of the power elite. His father, a Texas oil millionaire, tried to warn the authorities in Dallas, prior to Nov. 22, 1963, that JFK’s life was in danger. He had heard the rumors circulating.”
When we read this we thought, “Now we gettin’ into it!”
In our next story we’ll profile the dozen or so companies that together comprise “Saudi Genesis,” owned or backed by Khashoggi’s network, and take a look at how they’ve corporately affected us all…
But we want to close today’s story where it began…with an attorney who’d incorporated Genesis, and later led the effort to take it public. In yesterday’s email, we received a notice that he is–even as we speak!–taking another company public.
The press release was routine. Everyone always has nothing but nice things to say about each other. No talk of anyone getting ‘rubbed out” to mar the air of sunny optimism in the face of an ever-brighter tomorrow.
He stated, “The…story is a fresh and compelling one…” The company’s President and CEO, Dominique Einhorn, said “We are privileged to be associated with US EURO Securities…”
The reason we mention it is the name of the company ‘ol Michael Roy has got hisself excited about.
“Karma Media.”
We’re choosing to see this as an omen. A signal from the Universe.
A message from the Other Side.
Just for today, “Karma” has once again proven to our satisfaction the existence of an Almighty Creator, that, yes! There is a God.
He even has a sense of humor.
[…] authorities like to think is a relatively unusual situation for a corporate officer, Michael Muzio also found himself the target of a Mob hit. Testimony in an extortion trial in Tampa named Muzio as the intended […]
[…] in what authorities like to think is a relatively unusual situation for a corporate officer, also found himself the target of a Mob hit. Testimony in an extortion trial in Tampa named Michael Muzio as the […]