Conversations With the Crow

by Gregory Douglas

  They began a series of long and often very informative telephone conversations that lasted for four years. Douglas became so entranced with some of the material that Crowley began to share with him that he secretly began to record their conversations, later transcribing them word for word, planning to incorporate some, or all of the material in later publications.

  While CIA drug running , money-launderings and brutal assassinations are very often strongly rumored and suspected, it has so far not been possible to actually pin them down but it is more than possible that the publication of the transcribed and detailed Crowley-Douglas conversations will do a great deal towards accomplishing this.

  Regicide

  The Official Assassination of John F. Kennedy

  Thirty Nine years after the assassination of Preident John F. Kennedy, the truth finally comes to light: In 1996, Robert Trumbull Crowley, former head of Clandestine Operations of the CIA, gave documents of his own top secret operations to his friend, historian Gregory Douglas.

  Robert Crowley died in late 2000. Now Gregory Douglas begins publishing important sections of the Crowley Papers. This is the first of a series of shocking revelations of the secret plots of top officials of the US government.

  “Operation ZIPPER” was the code name for the forced removal of John F. Kennedy, President of the United States of America. This operation was implemented with the help, approval, and/or knowledge of the FBI, the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the U.S. Army, and the Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson, under the aegis of the CIA.

  Backed up with documents reproduced in the book, Douglas proves, which individuals plotted to kill John F. Kennedy, why they thought that this assassination was justified, how it was done, who else was involved, and how the cover up of this major clandestine operation was mounted.

  However one may respond to the horrific contents of this book, one has to be impressed by its internal coherence; and it also brings some welcome clarity to the prolix and entangled drama of the JFK assassination. It should trigger a fresh Congressional inquiry into this national tragedy.”

  Fredrick J. Norris,

  LtCdr., US Naval Attache, ret

  Descending Into Darkness

  The Making of a Wartime President

  By: Brian Harring

  “THE HARRING REPORT IS ANOTHER ‘DEEP THROAT’”

  Published for the first time ever, Descending Into Darkness includes the complete (at the time this book went to press) DoD official list of U.S. Military casualties in Afghanistan and Iraq.

  Also in Prelude to Disaster:

  Events leading up to Operation Iraqi Freedom

  War in Iraq – Russian Military Intelligence Reports & Assessment [March 17-April 8, 2003]

  The “Nazi” Neocons – Who are they?

  The Secret Downing Street Memo – Setting the Stage for WMD

  Israeli Espionage Against the United States

  The Bunche Report

  This report is a compilation of all identified terrorist attacks on British, American and Arab individuals and entities in the assassination of the British Resident Minister in the Middle East on November 6, 1944 by members of the terrorist Jewish Stern gang to the assassination of Count Bernadotte on September 17, 1948 by members of this same gang of fanatics.

  This information is compiled from reports of the US Department of State, the British Foreign Office and various American and British press services.

  New York, October 1, 1948

  Basilisk Press is constantly adding titles to our catalogue. We are particularly proud to publish Mr. Robert Fadley's new book, "Season of Evil" which is a political thriller/satire and social commentary. We like to think of it as a little like Holden Caulfield meets Harry Flashman.

  We include here a short excerpt of the text so you can judge for yourself.

  Preface

  This is in essence a work of fiction, but the usual disclaimers notwithstanding, many of the incidents related herein are based entirely on factual occurrences.

  None of the characters or the events in this telling are invented and at the same time, none are real. And certainly, none of the participants could be considered by any stretch of the imagination to be either noble, self-sacrificing, honest, pure of motive or in any way socially acceptable to anything other than a hungry crocodile, a professional politician or a tax collector.

  In fact, the main characters are complex, very often unpleasant, destructive and occasionally, very entertaining.

  To those who would say that the majority of humanity has nothing in common with the characters depicted herein, the response is that mirrors only depict the ugly, evil and deformed things that peer into them

  There are no heroes here, only different shapes and degrees of villains and if there is a moral to this tale it might well be found in a sentence by Jonathan Swift, a brilliant and misanthropic Irish cleric who wrote in his 'Gulliver's Travels,"

  "I cannot but conclude the bulk of your natives to be the most odious race of little pernicious vermin that Nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth."

  Swift was often unkind in his observations but certainly not inaccurate.

  Frienze, Italy

  July 2010-August 2012

  1.

  Early in April, a small, late model foreign-made car drove down quiet residential streets in the expensive suburb of Brentwood, California. The sun was preparing to vanish over the horizon in orange and hazy glory when the car pulled into an expensive strip mall that included a theater specializing in homoerotic Chinese films, and parked at the back of the lot.

  Two men got out of the car and opened the trunk, loading their arms with bulging shopping bags. Traffic was light and they crossed the street and headed up an alley bisecting a block of expensive homes.

  They were both in their mid-twenties, dressed in dark clothes and wearing shoes with soft rubber soles.

  One was tall and thin with short, blonde hair, an aquiline nose, high cheekbones and very bright blue eyes. He was the unwanted and certainly unloved scion of a very prominent, and very wealthy, American business family. His family, mainly for economic reasons, had every reason to wish him dead and he reciprocated their feelings entirely. However, unlike his wealthy and powerful relatives, he was far more intelligent, perceptive, stubborn and dangerous than they were.

  His companion on this savage, amoral and punitive expedition was much shorter, muscular and with dark, curly hair. A number of his personal habits were such as would have made him an instant pariah among the parents of young girls and various law enforcement agencies had they become aware of them. On the positive side, however, he did have the advantage of never caring about the views of others and the additional strength of unquestioning loyalty, in this case towards his present companion, co-worker and fellow vandal.

  Their expedition had no redeeming virtue whatsoever and neither did the terrible chain of catastrophic events that would follow in its wake. Their intentions were purely malicious and punitive, though very minor in scope, yet from this small, defective seed, there would soon be an eventual flowering of sudden, violent death to many, a terrible destruction of valuable real estate and eventually, the complete collapse of the Republic.

  "Are you sure this is the right place, Chuck?" the short man asked as they walked down the long alley, flanked with high stone walls, thick hedges, large garages, floodlit gardens and gates with menacing warnings about trespassing and its penalties.

  "No, I'm lost, Lars. I think we'll just break into the first house we see and rape everyone inside. Then we can gut them and set the house on fire. Does that sound OK to you?"

  "I did not come along on this thing, Chuck, to rape people or set their houses on fire. We have a job to do, don't we? We are going to teach a real lesson to our employers aren't we? We can rape people and burn their houses down some other time. I think we should concentrate on old Art and Estelle and think about the other stuff later."

  "Well, that's what we planned on
, Lars. And Jesus, don't take me literally. People who live around here are rich, fat and ugly. Do you want to rape some fat, ugly person, Lars? I don't. Just shut up and keep walking. It's about halfway up the block on the right side."

  They continued down the alley, clutching their laden bags and hoping that no one was planning to put garbage into the large, plastic containers that were housed in neat, cinderblock stalls behind every house.

  The alley was deserted and the heavy hedges on both sides made excellent cover. The shorter man peered over his bags.

  "How far?"

  "Keep your voice down, idiot. And when we get into the house, button it up."

  Estelle Winrod and her husband Art were little more than walking piles of fecal matter. If they hadn't been, they would still be enjoying peace of mind in their expensive house in an affluent suburb of Los Angeles instead of Estelle talking to herself in public transportation and Art turning green in his air tight Eterna-Rest casket in Forest Lawn cemetery.

  Estelle ran an expensive jewelry shop at an upscale mall in Brentwood and Art did the bookkeeping. They both managed to intimidate and harass their staff with a daily menu of sadistic and petty entrees. Estelle loved to keep the daily work schedule in such a state of deliberate confusion that no one ever knew two weeks in a row which days or hours off they would have while Art took his pleasure in alternately forgetting overtime pay and giving out the paychecks two days late.

  Every spring, without fail, Estelle and Art would close the shop for two weeks while they went to Las Vegas and wallowed in the joys of small-time betting and watching has-been performers doing their tired lounge acts. Naturally, while the store was closed, the employees had an unpaid vacation but one summer, two of them decided to give Estelle and Art a wonderful homecoming present: They would totally redecorate their house for them.

  Estelle and Art had no children and they took out their barren bitterness on their staff while their creative affections were lavished on a pop-eyed and bloated poodle named 'Pierre' and their house.

  Two days after the Winrods had packed their matching luggage into their pistachio colored Continental and driven off towards hours of joy with Wayne Newton and Tony Bennett, the sun was sinking down into the grimy haze of a smoggy Los Angeles twilight.

  The back gate leading into the Winrod's pool area split open as someone jammed a small crowbar into it and their very best salesman and his associate, the store's watch repairman, crept across the crunching gravel. They were wearing dark clothing and both were staggering under armfuls of bulging shopping bags.

  The Great Redecoration Project was about to be launched.

  The Winrods were too cheap to pay for an alarm system, trusting to the hysterical barking of 'Pierre' to frighten off putative burglars. 'Pierre' was now at the vet, full of tranquilizers, which was fortunate for him and the staff at the vet, most of whom had been bitten on the lower parts of their bodies by the lovable surrogate Winrod child.

  A glass sliding door yielded reluctantly to a crowbar and the pair entered the house burdened with packages and tools.

  The house, hidden from its neighbors by high hedges and fences, was not a large one. Two bedrooms, a living and dining room, two car garage, laundry room, three bathrooms, a kitchen and pantry plus various closets, a study, pool houses and work sheds were adequate for their needs and made the job of the recently arrived interior decorators much easier.

  The shopping bags contained eight gallons of heavy duty industrial bleach, concentrated red and green fabric dye, two small crowbars, a six-pound hammer, an ice pick with a cork stuck on its recently sharpened tip, gloves, a bag of iron filings from a machine shop, several screwdrivers and four very sharp linoleum knives.

  The violated glass door led into a hall between the living room and the rest of the house and the packages were set down on top of a fake Louis XVI sideboard with a vase full of garish plastic flowers. There were other equally tasteless pieces of junk on the cheap reproduction, including a basket full of broken pieces of colored marble, a color photograph of what looked like a convention of Mongoloids and a large sea shell with the painted inscription 'Souvenir of Tahiti."

  The house was in general bad taste, not expensive enough to get into 'Architectural Digest' but filled with enough garish furniture and bad art to be perfect for the Sunday supplements of the Los Angeles 'Times.'

  The redecorating crew, now busily engaged in urinating on the fake Peruvian hall rug, were looking forward to an evening of constructive desecration.

  Their first stop was the living room where the best salesman, whose name was Cyril but who preferred to be called Chuck, pointed to a large, orange enameled electric organ.

  "My God, Osvald, look at that monster. You could feed a family of seven on what that cost. Have you ever seen an orange organ, Osvald?"

  The watchmaker, who liked to be called Lars or Eric, but was generally called 'You There' at work, snorted.

  "I think they are supposed to be pink, Chuck. I have never seen an orange organ."

  At that moment, the automatic lights snapped on, giving the pair a moment of spastic colon but like a bad dinner, this too, passed.

  Against one wall was an equally large built-in television set which the pair took some effort to pull out of its niche. They decided not to smash the picture tube because Osvald-cum-Lars had heard that the dust from broken tubes could cause sterility so Chuck poured a small bag of iron filings down into the back.

  "When they turn this thing on, it will blow like a cherry bomb in a sewer. But just to make sure..."

  He picked up a ceramic vase that was decorated with a painting of a very ugly child, walked into the kitchen and filled it halfway with table salt and added the balance in tap water.

  This he poured down into the television set, saving some for the organ. While Chuck had been watering the tube, Osvald had been ripping the ivory keys off the organ and dropping them down into the gaping interior. Chuck poured the rest of the water into the intestines of the musical monstrosity but there must have been some kind of a wiring defect inside because the torrent was greeted with a bluish flash and the smell of ozone.

  "Jesus, Chuck, unplug the damned thing before it burns up. It smells terrible. Maybe you electrocuted their cat who was sleeping down there."

  "That's the ivory, Osvald. It's on fire, or rather it was. You can piss in it if you want because I've unplugged it."

  "I thought ivory was illegal," said the watchmaker as he opened one of the bags and took out a linoleum knife, sharpened to a razor edge.

  "Only to import it. Now start in on the rugs, Osvald. Cut a six inch strip out of them from one end to the other so they can't have them re-sewn and I'll take care of the rest of the room."

  There were prolonged sounds of ripping as Chuck slashed all the cushions and backs on the chairs and couches and he sneezed violently as a great cloud of feathers swirled around his head, looking like one of those snow globes so beloved of children.

  He saved one pillow and when Osvald reached for it, he lifted it over his head.

  "No, let me show you what to do with this, my friend." And he placed it against the marble facing of the fireplace, hitting it violently with a six-pound hammer. The stone splintered with a delicate, crunching sound like stepping on a kitten and Chuck then handed the torn pillow to his fellow worker.

  "Stuff this up the fireplace as far as you can and then later we can throw lots of rubber products in there and put a match to them. Does wonders for the paint on the walls."

  Lars was now jumping up and down on a thick-topped travertine marble coffee table but with no success.

  "This thing won't break, Chuck. Help me smash it with your hammer."

  "I have a much better idea," Chuck said as he poured a quantity of red dye over the polished stone. It looked like an Aztec sacrifice had taken place on it only minutes before.

  The best salesman stood back and admired his handiwork, backing into a stack of expensive books that Lars had stac
ked on the floor.

  "Oh my", said the admiring watchmaker, "it reminds me of my grandfather's farm on Sunday when we used to pluck the chickens."

  "For Christ's sake, Lars, do you always have to bring up sex?"

  "Sex? My grandfather used to cut the heads off the chickens and we would pluck them for Sunday dinner. What do I do with the rug parts?"

  "Put them in a bathtub and please stack all the books over by the door so we can dump them into the pool," Chuck said as he slashed the bottoms off the apricot-hued velvet drapes.

  "Look at some of the titles on those books, friend. 'Art in Peru' and 'Calls of the Whales.' Of course no one really reads these things and I'll bet that upstairs in his underwear drawer, old Art has his private collection of naked fat women in body harnesses with rubber balls stuck in their mouths."

  "That sounds like something I would like to see," said Lars with a rapturous grin. "Do you think he might be interested in animals, too?"

  "What a sick bastard! Well, let's get the show on the road."

  They inspected the living room which still stank like a badly vented crematorium and Chuck looked about with malicious interest.

  "We missed something Osvald."

  "What Chuck, and please don't call me that. People think I shot the President."

  Osvald was also known to Los Angeles child abuse authorities as the 'Mad Russian' for leaving teeth marks on the private parts of nubile but considerably underage girls that he took to unquestioning motels for talent checks. To date, he had never been caught and he prayed that his luck would hold in the long watches of this night.

  Chuck pointed to a sideboard with smashed drawers. On top of this was a tinted rogues gallery of mental defectives. It was an intermingling of the recessive gene pools of both Estelle and Art. Tinted and glazed icons of the unknown and unknowing awaited their desecration which was swift in coming.