Caradori
In July of 1989, Senator Schmit released a three-page report urging his subcommittee to “find out where the money went and you’ll find the rest,” because their previous tactics had yet to yield an indictment. This shift in direction of the subcommittee prompted three members, including its chief investigator Jerry Lowe, to resign.
After Lowe resigned, Schmit called upon Gary Caradori to succeed him as the Franklin subcommittee’s chief investigator. Assuming undercover disguises from priest to plumber, Caradori had a talent for finding teenage runaways enmeshed in prostitution and drugs. Caradori, a former Nebraska state patrolman, had founded an investigative firm in Lincoln, Nebraska, and the Lincoln Journal loved him: “When the police tell you their hands are tied ... when your only witness has skipped town and when the justice system seems like it’s breaking apart, people call Gary Caradori.”
In November and December 1989, Caradori interviewed Alisha Owen, Troy Boner, and Danny King (no relation to Larry King), all in their early 20s. Owen was serving time in the Nebraska Center for Women at York for writing bad checks, while Boner and Danny King were living in the Omaha area. Caradori recorded their sworn testimony on over 20 hours of videotape: They described being flown around the country as underage prostitutes and attending grotesquely sadistic pedophiliac orgies. Larry King, they said, had organized it all. (Caradori videotaped a fourth victim, Paul Bonacci, in May of 1990, who corroborated Owen, Boner, and Danny King. )
Almost immediately, “anonymous” sources started leaking to the Lincoln Journal and the Omaha World-Herald that “one or both” of the young men videotaped by Caradori had failed FBI polygraphs. The FBI refused comment, but State Senator Jerry Chizek denounced the leaks as a violation of federal law: “I’ve been around a lot of investigations in my 53 years,” he said in a Lincoln Journal article, “and I’ve never seen one like this in my life.”
