Comrade,

I know this is a lot of words and I apologize: blame Cory Booker, not me.

But if you don’t know about the magical world of longform investigative journalism, you’re missing out on learning all the best true crime stories two years before the Netflix documentaries come out. The field is also imminently dying (which is bad news for true crime fans), so I hope you enjoy its death knell.

Plus, it’s like a Tarantino movie, and you watch those: It’s a long and violent satire where nothing is sacred, filled with references you don’t understand. It’s drenched in self-indulgence and it rewrites history at the end.¹

The clickbait title is true, but it’s not the name of this story: revolutionaries need clicks too. History would do well to remember this story as The Devil and Mike Dukakis. Consider it Paul Revere’s only request.

If you’re wondering when I became a revolutionary, it’s when I watched a video that could start one.

Yours,

Less hot Danny Casolaro

P.S.: If you really like conspiracies, save this as a text file now in case you don’t get around to reading it until later.

¹ Four Rooms is his best ending, uncontested. It might be *the* best ending. Please stop doing this, Q.

--

That's Rob Lowe.

You probably know Rob Lowe: He's a super famous actor and he's been in lots of stuff.

Some of you spring chickens may not know that he was a teen idol who had a serious fall from grace in 1988: A sex tape leaked of Lowe in a threesome with a 16-year-old. It was very damaging to Lowe’s reputation at the time: a black spot that took him years to shake off.

But here's one even the Xest of Genners don't know: The Rob Lowe sex tape is our best evidence of a Jeffrey Epstein blackmail operation.

Horrible, isn’t it? You must be wondering which U.S. Presidents would do such a thing.

--

Let’s get some details on how this sex tape happened. Rob Lowe and some other Brat Pack members are in Atlanta. Some gracious host or another guides them to the Club Rio VIP room, where they’re given free reign and free champagne.

Two eager fans ask the waitress if they could have an introduction and Lowe approves. The three of them go to Lowe’s hotel room and they film the threesome, though it’s unclear if it was done secretly or with Lowe’s approval. When Lowe passes out, they take the tape, steal some cash and pills, and leave.

They reportedly begin circulating the tape the next day, though news of the tape doesn’t hit the public until the following year when mention of it shows up in the teen’s mother’s divorce case (as evidence of the father’s bad parenting). The affidavit also said the teen spoke of “blackmailing” Lowe for $2 million.

Okay, so it was a blackmail job, and it sounds like we already know who did it. What the hell does that have to do with Jeffrey Epstein?

For starters, Rob Lowe wasn’t in Atlanta for a film shoot or a press tour; he was at the Democratic National Convention supporting Michael Dukakis’ Presidential nomination against George H.W. Bush.

And the tape isn’t just the underage encounter; it actually has two different Rob Lowe threesomes.

But the hottest part by a mile sits in between (and if anyone can find it, please please let me know): a recording of Lowe meeting with Tom Hayden, a member of the Chicago Seven.

Most of them.

The Chicago Seven were an important bunch because they practiced the most effective from of protest in modern American history, and if we had kept doing it, we never would have gotten Rob Lowe’s bad boy arc (and Bo Derek wouldn’t have given at least one revolutionary a MILF fetish)² : They met the U.S. Government on its home turf and mocked the ever-loving shit out of it.

In 1968, they were arrested for conspiracy for organizing an anti-government protest at the Democratic National Convention at the height of the Vietnam War, and that was back when protests were real. The event, in the wake of the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy, was the flashpoint of 1960s counterculture. Notably for our tale, that is the exact same quadrennial event that Rob Lowe was filmed having sex with a teenager for blackmail at 20 years later.

I’ll let Tom Hayden tell us where he stood, as he told the U.S. Government during his sentencing (If you’re looking for role models, pay attention):

[The Government was] bound to put us away. They have failed. Oh, they are going to get rid of us, but they made us in the first place. We would hardly be notorious characters if they had left us alone in the streets of Chicago last year, but instead we became the architects, the masterminds, and the geniuses of a conspiracy to overthrow the government. We were invented. We were chosen by the Government to serve as scapegoats for all that they wanted to prevent happening in the 1970s.

The event they were arrested for protesting was the 1968 Democratic National Convention, the very same event where Rob Lowe was filmed having sex with a teenager. And again, that sex tape included footage of a meeting with Tom Hayden, a man who mirthfully and heroically teabagged the U.S. Government twenty years prior.

² And I'd never read about a truck fire and think a coup might be starting.

The great Tom Hayden. I hope he had a smokin' hot wife who joined him in his heroism, because he deserved one.

I hope you’ve inferred as much from the above, but thieves stole the public education system, so I’ll let you know what this tells us with certainty:

The Rob Lowe sex tape was political blackmail.

--

Some of you know enough about the CIA to see where this is going, but let’s walk through it for everybody. If you know what Poppy means and you know what kind of job a “Cuban exile in Miami” would have had, feel free to skip ahead.

If you weren’t around for his tenure as president (or even if you were), you’d be forgiven for thinking that Bush Senior is a footnote in history: a modern Chester A. Arthur stuck between Reagan and Clinton. Maybe too quaint to be harmful, or a legacy to a time when politics was decent and wise. Perhaps most likely, you never gave him much thought and you’re not sure you could pick him out of a lineup.

But that’s all just a classic spy trick: be invisible.

You've got no clue what his eyes look like, do you?

In 1976, the Central Intelligence Agency was dealing with some bad press. Nixon’s career had blown up in the Watergate scandal, and when you hear about anything Nixon did in Watergate, it’s usually shorthand for “Nixon and the CIA.” This led to the most intense public scrutiny of the CIA in its history, and all sorts of wild stuff was coming to light.

Suddenly, the public learned about The Family Jewels: the bombshell reports of the CIA’s Vietnam era hijinks. This spy branch of our government was engaging in kidnappings, break-ins, illegal surveillance, stealing mail, behavior modification research and assassination plots, to name a few. For the first time in their history, they brought on an outside director to clean up shop: a Nixon political appointee named George H.W. Bush.

But that can’t be true: no criminal organization would ever accept an outside boss.

If calling the CIA a criminal organization feels unearned, know that it’s true even if you’re pro-CIA: If assassinating democratically elected world leaders who don’t fully embrace extractive capital is necessary for our health and safety, it’s still a criminal activity that requires organized crime: good luck doing a military coup in a country where you don’t have mobsters on your side.³ If you need more evidence than that, read about The Family Jewels again.

That paradox was solved the year of Lowe’s sex tape, incidentally: An FBI memo from 1963 surfaced citing “George Bush of the Central Intelligence Agency.” He was in Miami meeting with Cuban exiles seven days after the Kennedy assassination (for those unaware, “Cuban exiles in Miami” in a 1963 FBI document would be best read as “anticommunist mobsters”).

So that’s who George H.W. Bush was: the pretend outsider to the most criminal arm of the United States government who secretly stroked the family jewels the whole time. Oh, and he was working with the networks at the heart of the JFK assassination one week later. Probably had a dumb little code name too (He did, it was Poppy).

His story continues (he became Vice President, for example), but some of us had our first orgasm listening to a John Parr song, so let’s skip ahead. When Michael Dukakis runs against him in 1988, Bush’s role at the big kidz secret crime clubhouse would be best described as mob boss.

For more on Poopy, Russ Baker’s Family of Secrets is in a league of its own, as far as I’m aware.

³ To steal explosives and mask their provenance so you can use them to shut down critically important highways, for instance. For more on theft to hide provenance, see The Inslaw Affair or Greenhouse v. Polychain for its lesser-known sequel.

--

Here’s a band-aid I’m going to rip off quickly, and I promise I’m not getting libertarian on you: Jeffrey Epstein was not a pedophile.

We know this because we know what his job was: He was a blackmail artist. Some of you just learned this when it broke that he tried to blackmail Bill Gates, but we had a hell of a lot of evidence before that. I won’t fault you if you didn’t know that, because the most important piece is the global media that refuses to talk about the mountain of blackmail evidence.

I won’t share that evidence because we’ve got a St. Elmo’s Fire to burn (and because I fucking dare somebody with flair that reads like ghost kitchen copy to call me on it in the comments), but if you approach that theory with an open mind and good faith and you learn about Jeffrey Epstein, you could be the lead plaintiff in the Betsy DeVos class action and you’d still get it: Jeffrey Epstein was a blackmail artist, and probably the world’s best.

Blackmail is an extremely specialized job. And since Jeffrey Epstein was one of the best in history, it lets us learn a whole lot more about him than we realized.

Jeffrey Epstein. Worse than a pedophile.

[Unrelated note and hopefully fun parlor trick: Despite what some may assert with no evidence in the comments, this post was written by a human]

The rabbit hole does strange things to a man, but he’s pretty hot, right? Not back in the day with the David Berkowitz haircut, and certainly fucking not when he got into the elevator to Harvard Heaven, but Bear Stearns executive⁴, jet-setting real-life George Clooney character (who hung out with George Clooney) Jeffrey Epstein? He’s no dime, but I’ve learned what “daddy” means enough to know Jeff Epstein could get it.

⁴ See: Silvergate, Signature, Credit Suisse, First Republic

Well lucky him, because it helps with the job. Makes it easier to gain peoples’ trust.

And he had eyes like a hawk too, you can see them in the picture: perfect for spotting someone a bit too trusting, a bit too reckless. If you met him at a party, you might be quite taken: he’d be charming and inviting, treating you like the only one he sees in a room full of billionaires.

He would exude comfort and poise with a ginger ale in hand: his sobriety is no surprise because it’s a job requirement of all pro snooker players: they need to be fully aware and in control of the operation that often requires drugs and alcohol.

Another strict job requirement is that you can’t be a pedophile. If you have Epstein’s job, most of your time with your sex abuse victims is built to gain their trust: You need to be their good guy against the evil person who did that to them. It’s why so much of his victims’ testimony isn’t about sex dungeons, it’s about talking and hanging out with people. In some situations, as may be the case with Mr. Lowe, the victim of sexual abuse is also a conspirator in the blackmail: they’re in on the con together – best not to go diddling that up.

If you don’t know former Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert, add him to your list because he’s another criminal who can go fuck his own corpse with a tire iron. He’s also a pedophile: He spent decades abusing children driven by his pedophilic desire to abuse children. Now imagine him trying to run a child sex blackmail operation:

“Okay, Dennis, here’s the child who we’re going to get a sultan to have sex with on camera. Please don’t fuck this child, because then we lose a whole lot of money instead of expanding our drug cartel.”

“Of course, Mr. President. I will not fuck this child.”

“Who’s supposed to fuck the child, Dennis?”

“…”

“The sultan, Dennis. The sultan fucks the child.”

“Got it, got it. Sultan fucks the child.”

“Right, exac-- Oh, come on Dennis! Stop fucking the child!! That’s it, we’re moving you to Ponzis.”

See? Not a pedophile; it gets in the way of the job. Did he sexually abuse minors? Oh absolutely, he did. He was a sex trafficker, he was a rapist, and he was a blackmail artist. Did he do it because when he gets horny it’s because he’s thinking about children? Impossible (And if you’ll own half of Amway someday and think this is the paragraph most worthy of discourse, please read the summary of pedophilia on Wikipedia first).

To be clear, I’m not letting Jeffrey Epstein off the hook on anything. In fact, Jeffrey Epstein is much more wretched than most understand (which I hope is a high bar). Though most crimes aren’t so easily quantifiable, blackmail is the one that belongs in the Ninth Circle of Hell. Because it’s the one where you get to be the devil.

Jeffrey Epstein (left)

Think about it: You get someone to entrust you with their deepest, darkest secrets, often by becoming their best friend in the world. And then you suddenly and ruthlessly exploit that trust as much as you can, a breach no less personally violating than rape. If we knew the statistics (and I bet NYU does), we would see a tragically high suicide rate among blackmail victims.

Though he may be gracious and charming, that’s just because he has the mask on; blackmail artists usually do. As every victim of blackmail knows, that mask stays firmly on until they’re ready to yank the rug out. And they always yank the rug out; inevitable as a Ponzi scheme: It’s why they’re doing blackmail. Only then do they take off their mask and show the devil underneath.

--

Okay, we know the Rob Lowe sex tape was political, the CIA is criminal, and Epstein did blackmail. Now let’s tie those together.

Organized criminals often use blackmail because it can be very lucrative (sometimes in the ballpark of “everything you own, now and in the future”). It was a favorite of Lucky Luciano, for instance, who ran his operation half a mile from Washington Square Park in Manhattan.

Though we mostly haven’t recognized it as such, it was a line item on the balance sheet just like running drugs or slot machines. And since the CIA is a criminal organization that is intertwined with the mafia (see: Lucky Luciano), the CIA had blackmail networks. They probably had a cute little nickname for it too (They did, it was snooker. And not many non-kleptocrats know that yet.)

Lucky Lucania. A man who could have used a longer one-way ride.

Jeffrey Epstein was most likely recognized and groomed to be a blackmail artist by the CIA. We don’t know for sure, but it would be a damn good guess: If a story has a blackmail artist and a CIA officer, the blackmail artist usually works for the CIA.

In 1974, he was hired at the prestigious Dalton School in Manhattan for some reason, despite having just dropped out of college, where OSS officer Donald Barr served as headmaster. The OSS was what became the CIA, and when you stroke the family jewels, you stroke them for life: Jeffrey Epstein almost certainly got hired there because he was recognized as a bright young talent as a blackmail artist at NYU.⁵

(If anybody would like to read Donald Barr’s trash sci-fi book Space Relations, I bet it’s a code book because CIA officers write code books. If it reads so dense and terribly as to put off any reader, then I know it is because it’s not written for them, unless it’s copy on a Stanford/Harvard/MIT AI/biomed/underwater Ponzi startup but that’s less likely. If it offers too many phrases that don’t make sense for the subject matter, it could be argot, which the spy boys use sometimes: often a general knowledge instructional. Might tell you how to run weapons or Ponzi schemes or something.)

⁵The school with all the dead students Underneath Their Robes.

Somebody should jump on this grenade for us, and I've already watched 10 hours of Peter Thiel interviews.

We also know the father of Epstein’s partner in crime, Ghislaine, was Robert Maxwell, an international spy with deep ties to maybe every espionage organization you’ve heard of, including the CIA. His role hasn’t been quite pegged down, but he worked with a whole lot of them before he fell off his yacht in 1991. And he probably wanted to put spyware in Tetris, which sounds like something the Langley Dildoes could get behind.

Plus, Jeffrey Epstein had an extremely close relationship with Bill Clinton: They flew around the world together, and Clinton had 13 points of contact in Epstein’s little black book (see Doug Band, the man who answered Papa Bill’s phone). Epstein helped start his multi-billion-dollar Clinton Global Foundation that takes money from autocrats. (Researchers take note: This organization may have something to do with all those flights around the world). Obviously, Clinton ran against Poppy so they’re on opposite sides, but it's clear that Epstein was close to the U.S. halls of power.

A global multi-billion dollar institution co-founded by a blackmail artist and funded by autocrats (You know her investors were in on it, right? Henry Kissinger doesn't get conned by Ponzi schemes.)

Okay, so maybe Epstein was a CIA agent. But why blackmail Lowe? I’ll offer a few theories:

First, Rob Lowe was a rising star in Hollywood. It can be great to blackmail someone like that into the game so they can make movies promoting your soft power goals. A “Clooney type,” some might say.

Second, the devil likes having fun, and maybe they just wanted to take the cocky teen idol down a peg.

But remember, we know it’s political blackmail. So maybe it’s not about Lowe at all; maybe it’s about Dukakis. He was running against a piece of shit mob boss, after all.

Maybe it’s because Dukakis is a squeaky-clean loser who can’t be blackmailed and thinks his job is to help poor people. Maybe I’m proudly running drugs around the country while a pussy like Mike Dukakis thinks poor people should have better lives (and don’t be surprised when the whole world finds out your wife drinks rubbing alcohol, Mike). You know, something to that effect.

--

Since the days of the Kingly Seven, The Democratic National Convention had become a more ceremonial event: A chance for the party to show some unity and announce the winner of the party primary to the world when everybody already knows who it is.

Primaries can be messy, but the convention typically goes off without much fuss these days: They pretend they all like each other, they say the right things, and it’s impossibly dull. But that was not the case in Atlanta in 1988 (I will say with a hint of understatement and then slightly more understatement).

“‘Nationally televised political suicide’, was the consensus.” Though the Democrats’ fastest rising star did soared on the back of his speeches, Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton was universally panned for his nominating speech of Mike Dukakis at the DNC that year. I’m sure all these journalists had a big ol’ carton of egg on their faces when that man became President of the United States 4 years later (and that none of those articles were kayfabe).

It’s ruthlessly funny, and also the most important political speech in world history, but you’re still not going to watch it, so I’ll tell you what happens. The links that follow are timestamped clips; 1.25x speed is perfect if you’re not from Arkansas.

Here’s another link to Bill Clinton’s 1988 DNC Nomination speech: the most important political speech in world history in case you changed your mind.

It doesn’t take long for us to realize that Bill Clinton loathes Michael Dukakis. He starts with some words about Dukakis but it’s unclear where they’re going. But you can tell from the tone and cadence that they’re building toward some great point - say what you will about how Bill Clinton is a fuckface criminal who should get pissed on as long as he doesn’t like it, he’s one of the best orators in the game:

“Michael Dukakis should be the first President born of immigrant parents since Andrew Jackson.”

In case you don’t know much about the United States, this is a racist right-wing talking point that I’m sure you’d find all over newsstands at the time. And again, Clinton and Dukakis are both Democrats and this is the Democrat unity speech.

I thought he was part Cherokee.

He spins up one of those politician stories about a fake friend back home: “He said, ‘Bill, are you excited about Mike Dukakis becoming President?’ And I said, ‘I sure am!’” he says with a masterful shake of the jowls.

“And then he looked at me and smiled and said, ‘…How can you get excited about a guy who mows his lawn with a hand-powered mower, and is so clean he squeaks when he walks?’

“And I thought about it, and I said, ‘Well that’s one reason I AM excited for Mike Dukakis to become President.”

So he absolutely hates the guy, and his favorite thing about him is that he’s squeaky clean. And Rob Lowe was just blackmailed. Huh.

Then he says something inexplicable (if you don’t know about snooker): “His character is steadfast and consistent. And one thing about Mike Dukakis is, he wakes up in the same world every morning,” his eyes sweep over and lock right onto to Dukakis, “which a trait of considerable importance for a President.” If you’re not great at picking up subtext, consider that Rob Lowe woke up in a viciously different world that Monday.

He continues: “I found Mike willing to listen: An important lesson, and one that Mike Dukakis and I learned the hard way.”

If that phrase didn't give you pause, I’d like you to think about any mob movie you’ve ever seen and read it more slowly.

He weaves out of this one and delivers the laugh of the night: “Mike and I met after our defeats: He was teaching at the Kennedy School, and I was the youngest ex-governor in history.”

At this point, even the ones who think Shark Tank is real see what’s going on: the crowd turns on him completely and a “We want Duke” chant takes over. It’s a big moment: he’s thinking on the fly, and it’s one of the last times Bill Clinton was nervous.

But then he throws his arm in the air: “Go ahead!” and an invincible smile takes over as he relishes in the hostile crowd. For just a second, he looks to his left and gives a smile at somebody, a little “whew, you like that one?”

(Epstein is this story’s MacGuffin: The Rob Lowe sex tape has the Kool Krime Kubscouts written all over it, but it could have been anyone at the DNC who’s sharpened a snooker cue. It could have been Ballbag Billy himself for all we know; 24-year-old Rob Lowe couldn’t have been the toughest mark. But if you find good crowd footage and want to go hunting, follow that smile.)

He lets the crowd think they matter for a beat, giving a villainous laugh in the middle. He slips the party unity mask back on and picks the speech back up, but he just tees up another Republican talking point.

This next bit is critical so I’ll quote it in full:

“When Mike Dukakis speaks out for the American family, you can believe him. I have never known a person more devoted and his wife and to his children. He and Kitty are as different as daylight and dark, but they’re so good together, and they’ll be wonderful role models for our young people. And Kitty Dukakis will be a First Lady this whole country will be proud of, and one who will gain respect worldwide.”

The next year, the world found out about Kitty Dukakis’ drinking problem when she was hospitalized for drinking rubbing alcohol. In case it's unclear, this is exactly what Bill Clinton just said:

"Mike Dukakis is such an eagle scout, you'd never guess that his wife has a drinking problem. And that's a secret that we'll share with the whole world very soon."

After some more racist vitriol of the day (I'm no expert on 1988 culture war issues, but I think Dukakis is a secret Mexican?), he tells us a bit about what Dukakis has done: “He has worked hard to bring good jobs to poor people in poor communities…in his state,” a jab lost on most.

The hits keep coming, but he lets us know a bit more about the Mike Dukakis:

“He cares that one in four children under five are living under the poverty line…he understands that today, a middle-class family has to spend a lot more of its income to send a child to college and he thinks government ought to help make up the difference [he says with disdain]…He feels the pain of a mother who leaves for work worried sick that her child is not in a good childcare center.”

A great and humble servant to this country, eyebrow legend Michael Dukakis.

He pivots to the state of crime, and he offers this curious anecdote:

“A few weeks ago, the police in Detroit, Michigan broke a huge crack ring. And I’m sorry to say, the ring was being run by two people in my state [author’s note: his sorrow doesn’t translate to film]. They came from the poorest part of Arkansas, and they brought over one hundred young men up there to help them peddle dope. And the news stories were very touching: they said, “We brought these kids up from the country because they’re more reliable than those city kids; they’ll give us a good day’s work for a good day’s pay.”

Bet you've never heard a U.S. President brag about his state's drug cartels before. There are some more gems, but I’d rather not die in a Kinko’s so let’s bring it home.

Do we know who blackmailed Rob Lowe? Sadly, we don’t. While it’s almost certainly related to the villains of our story, that could have been an entirely separate political blackmail job at the DNC that year. And though I highly doubt it, I’m not even kidding: there might have been a snooker tournament in Atlanta that week.

But what we do know, with enough evidence that we could prosecute in a court of law if the rest of this sentence wouldn’t make it farcical, that President Bill Clinton blackmailed Governor Mike Dukakis (and we can guess Kitty had a less sensational drink of choice). And almost all of that evidence is in one of the funniest political speeches in history. And very few people know that.

Infinitely more importantly, as the Chicago Seven showed us, we can prosecute in the court of public opinion.

We also have a strong lead that Bill Clinton runs with drug dealers. That might sound like a blockchain too far, but I’ll kick you over to the podcast Ghost Stories for the End of the World’s Arkansas episodes, and the best Tom Cruise movie you probably haven’t seen for more on how that’s completely true.

We can open an investigation into collusion between George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton in the 1992 Presidential election (and therefore, Gore v. Poppyseed in 2000, Hillary Clinton v. Trump in 2020, etc.).

We can’t prove it here, but Bush was a secret CIA mob boss and Clinton was supposed to give a speech supporting Mike Dukakis against that mob boss but made fun of Mike Dukakis and talked about how he tried to blackmail him instead. I think that one will close quickly: as Racist Bill said when ambushed by a world hero who asked about his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein (with a devilish grin), “I think the evidence is clear.” (And that’s before we realize Ross Perot was the grandfather of crypto and it was a three-man job)

There’s a cold case from the early aughts we can reopen now, too. That one might take a bit more digging, but I’ll kick it off with exhibit A, which is about as on-the-nose as an FBI memo saying George Bush was meeting with Cuban exiles in Miami one week after JFK was killed (because Poppy leaked it, the cheeky little bitch).

One of the only two paintings that remained hanging in Jeffrey Epstein’s $70 million townhouse after he was arrested, and the only thing the Octopus could have bought me with (besides a date with Cathie Wood because I'd give you all up to fuck a hot older criminal):

Tell the appropriation committee I've got dibs.

I think we’ve long outgrown our need for someone else to tell us what to do, but if I have to vote, I’m voting for Dukakis. I can’t vouch for his record, but I don’t hate wanting to improve people’s lives.

But he gets my vote because Mike Dukakis is a man so good, that for thirty minutes in Atlanta in 1988, the devil took off his mask.

--

If anyone would like to join me, I’m headed to Washington to practice the lost art of the Chicago Seven and mock the ever-loving shit out of our criminal government and give them the complete lack of respect they deserve.

And if your kids are going to wear Blackwater surplus one day, know that we’ve got some pretty good ammunition.