vault backup: 2026-09-22 19:54:11

10 - PEOPLE/(N-S)/Francis Shelden.md

@@ -36,7 +36,7 @@ After Richards's arrest in July 1976, in possession of pornographic films, he to
 
 ### The Wider Network
 
-Richards's films led Tennessee authorities to raid Boys Farm Inc. near Alto, the [[Father Bud's Boys Farm]] of the Episcopal priest Claudius I. "Bud" [[Cladius Vermilye|Vermilye]] Jr., who was indicted on sixteen counts; its list of more than 270 "active sponsors" included Shelden. Vermilye's eldest son had disappeared on July 5, 1974. In [[New Orleans]], the leader of Boy Scout [[Troop 137]], Richard Halverson, and twelve other men, including the Massachusetts industrialist [[Richard C. Jacobs]] of Jet Spray Corporation and the realtor Hugh Scott Mellor, were charged with conspiracy; Halverson, a volunteer probation officer, had drawn up applications for state and federal money for homes for boys, and the Louisiana and Tennessee welfare departments had paid for children placed with the groups. "It seems to be like spider webs strung out all over the nation," said the New Orleans juvenile detective Mason Spong. Correspondence and films seized in the raids came "from Australia and Canada and virtually every state in the Union."[^1]
+Richards's films led Tennessee authorities to raid Boys Farm Inc. near Alto, the [[Father Bud's Boys Farm]] of the Episcopal priest Claudius I. "Bud" [[Claudius Vermilye|Vermilye]] Jr., who was indicted on sixteen counts; its list of more than 270 "active sponsors" included Shelden. Vermilye's eldest son had disappeared on July 5, 1974. In [[New Orleans]], the leader of Boy Scout [[Troop 137]], Richard Halverson, and twelve other men, including the Massachusetts industrialist [[Richard C. Jacobs]] of Jet Spray Corporation and the realtor Hugh Scott Mellor, were charged with conspiracy; Halverson, a volunteer probation officer, had drawn up applications for state and federal money for homes for boys, and the Louisiana and Tennessee welfare departments had paid for children placed with the groups. "It seems to be like spider webs strung out all over the nation," said the New Orleans juvenile detective Mason Spong. Correspondence and films seized in the raids came "from Australia and Canada and virtually every state in the Union."[^1]
 
 ### Amsterdam
 

10 - PEOPLE/(N-S)/Gerald Richards.md

@@ -10,7 +10,7 @@ Gerald Richards, full name Gerald Stewart Richards, was a high school gym teache
 On July 12, 1976, Richards took four students aged 8 to 14 to a private airstrip where [[Francis Shelden]] flew them to [[North Fox Island]] for two nights at [[Brother Paul's Children's Mission]], where Shelden performed sex acts on at least one boy and photographed him naked. Upon return, the boy reported the abuse, leading to Richards's arrest on July 23, 1976, after police found naked photos of boys and a letter to Shelden in his glove compartment warning him to move files to [[North Fox Island]]. Richards confessed to molesting boys in exchange for partial immunity and provided details on producing and distributing child pornography, including processing films from [[Father Bud's Boys Farm]] in Monteagle, Tennessee, and mailing them via Mail-O-Matic in [[North Carolina]] to F&S Distributors in California. In August 1976, he handed over a letter from [[Dyer Grossman]] dated July 19, 1976, outlining plans for foster homes in Michigan to house runaways for government payments and mentioning a 12-year-old boy procured through a Big Brother program for camping trips. Richards was sentenced on September 13, 1976, to 2 to 20 years in Southern Michigan Prison in Jackson after pleading guilty to criminal sexual conduct in the first degree, and from prison he sketched a network diagram in September 1976 detailing a coast-to-coast child pornography operation.[^1]
 
 ### Connections
-Richards met [[Francis Shelden]] in 1975 through Better Life Monthly, corresponded by mail, met at hotels and Shelden's Ann Arbor estate to abuse boys together, and Shelden recruited him to direct a summer camp on [[North Fox Island]] for child pornography production. Shelden connected Richards to [[Dyer Grossman]] of The [[The Church of New Revelation]] in [[New Jersey]], a fake church used to incorporate [[Brother Paul's Children's Mission]] as a non-profit subsidiary for tax-exempt status, allowing the camp to receive court-ordered juvenile delinquents for abuse and filming. Grossman, a science teacher from a wealthy Long Island family working at an exclusive New York boys’ boarding school, traveled to Michigan to draft the charter and planned foster homes for runaways, with a letter mentioning a 12-year-old boy for sexual use. [[Adam Starchild]] ([[Malcolm Willis McConahy]]) incorporated [[Brother Paul's Children's Mission]] and The [[Ocean Living Institute]], fronts for Shelden's operations; Starchild faked his death in 1975. Richards identified [[Cladius Vermilye]], an Episcopal priest running [[Father Bud's Boys Farm]] in Tennessee, as sending child pornography films for processing, where juveniles were drugged, filmed in orgies, and offered to sponsors for visits, with the farm raided in November 1976 and linked to The [[The Church of New Revelation]]. He named [[Richard Halvorsen]], a New Orleans scoutmaster arrested in September 1976 for a boy prostitution ring using [[Troop 137]], whose files connected to Vermilye's farm and [[John David Norman]]'s [[Delta Project]] via index cards on boys’ sexual preferences. Richards linked the operation to [[John David Norman]]’s [[Odyssey Network]], referring to boy exchanges as a "Cadet racket" and "fellows" supplied to sponsors, with Norman’s [[Delta Project]] using newsletters like [[Hermes]] for prostitution and pornography distribution.[^1]
+Richards met [[Francis Shelden]] in 1975 through Better Life Monthly, corresponded by mail, met at hotels and Shelden's Ann Arbor estate to abuse boys together, and Shelden recruited him to direct a summer camp on [[North Fox Island]] for child pornography production. Shelden connected Richards to [[Dyer Grossman]] of The [[The Church of New Revelation]] in [[New Jersey]], a fake church used to incorporate [[Brother Paul's Children's Mission]] as a non-profit subsidiary for tax-exempt status, allowing the camp to receive court-ordered juvenile delinquents for abuse and filming. Grossman, a science teacher from a wealthy Long Island family working at an exclusive New York boys’ boarding school, traveled to Michigan to draft the charter and planned foster homes for runaways, with a letter mentioning a 12-year-old boy for sexual use. [[Adam Starchild]] ([[Malcolm Willis McConahy]]) incorporated [[Brother Paul's Children's Mission]] and The [[Ocean Living Institute]], fronts for Shelden's operations; Starchild faked his death in 1975. Richards identified [[Claudius Vermilye]], an Episcopal priest running [[Father Bud's Boys Farm]] in Tennessee, as sending child pornography films for processing, where juveniles were drugged, filmed in orgies, and offered to sponsors for visits, with the farm raided in November 1976 and linked to The [[The Church of New Revelation]]. He named [[Richard Halvorsen]], a New Orleans scoutmaster arrested in September 1976 for a boy prostitution ring using [[Troop 137]], whose files connected to Vermilye's farm and [[John David Norman]]'s [[Delta Project]] via index cards on boys’ sexual preferences. Richards linked the operation to [[John David Norman]]’s [[Odyssey Network]], referring to boy exchanges as a "Cadet racket" and "fellows" supplied to sponsors, with Norman’s [[Delta Project]] using newsletters like [[Hermes]] for prostitution and pornography distribution.[^1]
 
 ### Footnotes
 [^1]: Dovey, S. (2023). Eye of the Chickenhawk. United States: Thehotstar.

10 - PEOPLE/(N-S)/Gerard John Schaefer.md

@@ -24,7 +24,7 @@ Gerard John Schaefer (March 26, 1946, Neenah, Wisconsin, to December 3, 1995, Fl
 
 ### Teaching, Security Work and the Police
 
-Schaefer grew up in Nashville, Atlanta and, from 1960, Fort Lauderdale, graduated from St. Thomas Aquinas High School in 1964, and took a degree at [[Florida Atlantic University]] in 1968; a university psychological evaluation that year found "impairment in reality testing." He student-taught geography at Plantation High School from September 23 to November 7, 1969, when he was dismissed after complaints from students and parents, and was let go from a second internship at Stranahan High School about seven weeks after it began on April 2, 1970. His first wife, Martha Fogg, divorced him on May 2, 1970, on grounds of extreme cruelty. He then travelled in Europe and North Africa, and on his return took work as a security guard, with the [[Wackenhut Corporation]] by one account and Florida Power & Light by another.[^1][^3][^4]
+Schaefer grew up in Nashville, [[Atlanta]] and, from 1960, Fort Lauderdale, graduated from St. Thomas Aquinas High School in 1964, and took a degree at [[Florida Atlantic University]] in 1968; a university psychological evaluation that year found "impairment in reality testing." He student-taught geography at Plantation High School from September 23 to November 7, 1969, when he was dismissed after complaints from students and parents, and was let go from a second internship at Stranahan High School about seven weeks after it began on April 2, 1970. His first wife, Martha Fogg, divorced him on May 2, 1970, on grounds of extreme cruelty. He then travelled in Europe and North Africa, and on his return took work as a security guard, with the [[Wackenhut Corporation]] by one account and Florida Power & Light by another.[^1][^3][^4]
 
 Applying to the Wilton Manors police (the year is given as both 1970 and 1971), he claimed two years as a research assistant at the university and said he had recently returned from [[Morocco]]; the department did not check. He had already failed the [[Broward County Sheriff's Office|Broward County Sheriff's Department]] psychological test. Wilton Manors dismissed him after six months for what its chief, Bernard Scott, called "a lack of common sense," and Martin County hired him as a deputy in June 1972 on the strength of a forged Wilton Manors recommendation.[^1][^3]
 

10 - PEOPLE/(N-S)/Jean-Michel Nihoul.md

@@ -41,7 +41,7 @@ In 1995 and 1996 Nihoul was an informant of the gendarmerie's BSR in Dinant; the
 
 [[Achats Services Commerces]] (ASCO) was founded on July 2, 1991, at Wasmes by the operator of Le Dolo, Nihoul's companion and a third Dolo client, went into voluntary liquidation on June 23, 1995, and was declared bankrupt by the commercial court of Mons on October 9, 1995; Nihoul was at least its de facto manager in 1994, and the commission linked the company to the reports of white Mercedes cars.[^1] He had met Dutroux a year before his arrest through Lelièvre, to whom he sold drugs. [[Michelle Martin]] told investigators that Dutroux had been in frequent contact with Nihoul around the abduction of Laetitia Delhez, and Dutroux said Nihoul was looking for girls for a Belgian prostitution network. Nihoul was led from the courthouse at Neufchâteau on August 16, 1996, to shouts of "à mort." His companion [[Marleen De Cokere]] was arrested in late September. His warrant in the Dutroux case was lifted in January 1997.[^3][^5] Nihoul told *Der Spiegel* in 2001, "I have the government in hand," and offered, for a six-figure sum, a photograph of the then Prince Albert with a naked sixteen-year-old taken at the Mirano club twenty years earlier.[^6] [[Regina Louf]], the witness X1, alleged that he organized parties at which children were abused; the prosecutors-general closed the files opened on her testimony in April 1998.[^7]
 
-At the trial in Arlon in 2004, Dutroux accused Nihoul of being his link to a ring kidnapping girls for prostitution, which Nihoul denied. Only seven of the twelve jurors found him guilty of the abductions, and the professional judges acquitted him of every charge connected with the children; on June 22, 2004, he was sentenced to five years for drug trafficking and criminal association. He left Saint-Gilles prison on parole on April 28, 2006, and retired with his companion to the Belgian coast, where he died on October 23, 2019.[^3][^4]
+At the trial in Arlon in 2004, Dutroux accused Nihoul of being his link to a ring kidnapping girls for prostitution, which Nihoul denied. Véronique Laurent, convicted of ordering the killing of her husband, [[Michel Piro]], testified that Nihoul had come to their bar, La Terrasse, four or five times.[^8] Only seven of the twelve jurors found him guilty of the abductions, and the professional judges acquitted him of every charge connected with the children; on June 22, 2004, he was sentenced to five years for drug trafficking and criminal association. He left Saint-Gilles prison on parole on April 28, 2006, and retired with his companion to the Belgian coast, where he died on October 23, 2019.[^3][^4]
 
 ### Footnotes
 
@@ -52,3 +52,4 @@ At the trial in Arlon in 2004, Dutroux accused Nihoul of being his link to a rin
 [^5]: "Belgian pedophile case." United Press International, September 24, 1996. https://www.upi.com/Archives/1996/09/24/Belgian-pedophile-case/1297843537600/
 [^6]: "Im Netz der Dossiers." *Der Spiegel,* October 15, 2001, as translated in "Excerpt: Der Spiegel Interviews Michel Nihoul," Magic Kingdom Dispatch, 2017; the German original was not seen.
 [^7]: Sénat de Belgique. Proposition visant à instituer une commission d'enquête parlementaire chargée d'enquêter sur l'éloignement de deux enquêteurs de la cellule d'enquête bruxelloise « Neufchâteau », déposée par M. Frans Lozie, Doc. 2-563/1, October 9, 2000.
+[^8]: Hovine, Annick. "La cour d'assises fait la tournée des bars de Charleroi." *La Libre Belgique,* April 28, 2004.

10 - PEOPLE/(N-S)/Lee Rawls.md

@@ -22,7 +22,7 @@ W. Lee Rawls (Newport, Rhode Island, to December 2010, aged 66) was the [[Depart
 
 ### Thornburgh's Congress Man
 
-In 1990, as Gonzalez prepared a full-scale investigation of the Atlanta branch of BNL, Rawls wrote Thornburgh a briefing memorandum: "Our best attempt to thwart any further congressional inquiry by the House Banking Committee into this case is to have you contact Chairman Gonzalez directly." Gonzalez declined to take the attorney general's call, and Thornburgh wrote to him of his "profound disappointment." In May and July 1991 Rawls corresponded on the department's behalf with the House Judiciary Committee during its INSLAW investigation.[^2][^3]
+In 1990, as Gonzalez prepared a full-scale investigation of the [[Atlanta]] branch of BNL, Rawls wrote Thornburgh a briefing memorandum: "Our best attempt to thwart any further congressional inquiry by the House Banking Committee into this case is to have you contact Chairman Gonzalez directly." Gonzalez declined to take the attorney general's call, and Thornburgh wrote to him of his "profound disappointment." In May and July 1991 Rawls corresponded on the department's behalf with the House Judiciary Committee during its INSLAW investigation.[^2][^3]
 
 ### Later Career
 

10 - PEOPLE/(N-S)/Michel Piro.md

@@ -0,0 +1,30 @@
+---
+category: "Belgium Scandals"
+aliases:
+  - "Michel Pirot"
+tags:
+  - Person
+  - Belgium
+  - Dutroux
+summary: "Charleroi bar and small-zoo owner, shot dead in December 1996 after telling many people he had revelations on the Julie and Mélissa case; his wife was convicted of ordering the killing."
+died: 1996-12
+location: "Nalinnes, Belgium"
+relations:
+  - type: spouse_of
+    with: "[[Véronique Laurent]]"
+    fn: 1
+created: 2026-09-22
+updated: 2026-09-22
+---
+
+Michel Piro, a Charleroi businessman, ran a small zoo and the bar La Terrasse at Nalinnes with his wife, [[Véronique Laurent]].[^1][^2] In 1996 he proposed holding a meal at his establishment for the benefit of [[Julie Lejeune]] and [[Melissa Russo]], the girls abducted by [[Marc Dutroux]], and, according to the testimony later heard at Dutroux's trial, told 21 different people that he would also make revelations about the case. He was shot dead a few days after saying so, in December 1996.[^1][^2][^3]
+
+Laurent was convicted by the assize court of Hainaut of having ordered her husband's killing, following a marital dispute, and was held at Mons prison. The two alleged killers, both French, were tried in France and acquitted for lack of proof.[^1][^2]
+
+At Dutroux's trial in Arlon in April 2004, Laurent appeared in handcuffs. Asked whether she thought her husband had been killed because he was about to make revelations about the Julie and Mélissa case, she answered: "Je ne le pense pas." She said she had seen [[Jean-Michel Nihoul]] several times between 1988 and 1991 in the bar she ran, "four or five times" at La Terrasse, but not Dutroux or [[Bernard Weinstein]]. Thirteen witnesses testified that Piro had spoken of revelations, though not all of them drew a causal link; he had confided their content to no one.[^1][^2]
+
+### Footnotes
+
+[^1]: Hovine, Annick. "La cour d'assises fait la tournée des bars de Charleroi." *La Libre Belgique,* April 28, 2004. https://www.lalibre.be/belgique/2004/04/28/la-cour-dassises-fait-la-tournee-des-bars-de-charleroi-WAGNOBTACJFZZN67NUYUOP6N6I/
+[^2]: B. F. "L'épouse Piro à la barre." *La Dernière Heure,* April 29, 2004. https://www.dhnet.be/archives-journal/2004/04/29/lepouse-piro-a-la-barre-UKTT2QBPARH7VCP6QJTD6HF6NI/
+[^3]: Dovey, S. *Eye of the Chickenhawk.* Thehotstar, 2023, for the month of the killing (given as December 5, 1996).

10 - PEOPLE/(N-S)/Ricky Ross.md

@@ -122,7 +122,7 @@ Blandón called from Miami, dropping hints about cheap cocaine. Ross had checked
 
 Ross expanded methodically, first into Lincoln Heights, then Over-the-Rhine, Avondale, Mt. Airy, Bond Hill, St. Bernard, Lockland, and Walnut Hills, using the same marketing techniques from L.A.: free cocaine, smoke parties, volume discounts. "I knew the recipe. It's just like it was in L.A. If you want to get in with the blacks, you find out who the shot-caller is. And you talk to him and you get him on your side." Once operations were running, Ross called L.A. and invited friends to staff them. "The recruits were given apartments, beepers, cocaine, and instructions on how to conduct street sales," the Justice Department Inspector General reported. "Most of these people were members of gangs, most notably the Crips." Suddenly Cincinnati had two problems it had never had before: Crips and crack.[^9]
 
-Ross did not limit himself to Cincinnati. His dope turned up in Toledo, Cleveland, Columbus, Indianapolis, St. Louis, Atlanta, Texas, and as far away as Seattle, where police viewed his ring as "the single most important group distributing crack cocaine in the Seattle-Tacoma area." In ten months, Ross said, he sold 300 or 400 kilos of Blandón's cocaine in the Midwest, netting around $2 million. He flew to Miami once a month to drop off cash, and met with Blandón and a Colombian named Tony in [[New York City]] to place orders. At other times, his L.A. friends stuck dope on a Greyhound bus.[^9]
+Ross did not limit himself to Cincinnati. His dope turned up in Toledo, Cleveland, Columbus, Indianapolis, St. Louis, [[Atlanta]], Texas, and as far away as Seattle, where police viewed his ring as "the single most important group distributing crack cocaine in the Seattle-Tacoma area." In ten months, Ross said, he sold 300 or 400 kilos of Blandón's cocaine in the Midwest, netting around $2 million. He flew to Miami once a month to drop off cash, and met with Blandón and a Colombian named Tony in [[New York City]] to place orders. At other times, his L.A. friends stuck dope on a Greyhound bus.[^9]
 
 ### The Greyhound Bust