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Who
is Stephanie Caruana?
Caruana Timeline
©2002 by Jim Moore
1968 - Graduates from
Bishop Kearney High School?
1970 - Caruana claims to
have had conversations with Bruce Roberts - four years before
she even met Mae Brussell, who was the first one to expose
her to Roberts' letters:
At one point, in 1970 or
so, Roberts
referred to "4 telephone-book-sized" piles of manuscripts that had
preceded his current writing. I have a stack the thickness of about 1
telephone book, (we are not talking small-town–in-Tennessee phone books here),
and I know there is a lot that I don't have. … (E-mail from Caruana to Moore,
1 Dec. 2000)
20 Aug. 1971 - Midnight
(Canadian tabloid) publishes its first article about Howard
Hughes being buried off a Greek island years before his official
death.
18 Oct. 1971 - Midnight
(Canadian tabloid) publishes a second article about Howard
Hughes being buried off a Greek island years before his official
death. This is the article that served as the basis for
Caruana's 1974 article.
1972 - Begins writing for Playgirl
magazine. At one point, she claims this is when she met Bruce
Roberts "through Mae Brussell." (see 1970)
"What
I have dates from 1970-1972, and again, 1974-5--about 400 pages in
all In return, I will send you if you wish a copy of the new
book as soon as it is available. I think you will find it very
interesting." (E-mail from Caruana to Moore, 1 Dec.
2000)
If she only has material "from 1970-1972, and
again, 1974-5" - how does she claim to have gotten all the
other Gemstone material outside of those dates, going back to 1932?
(She now claims to have it going back to 1920). She claims (see Late
Summer 1974) that:
"But
I want to point out that I wrote the Skeleton Key early in
1975, using current Bruce Roberts letters as my main
source, and I doubt that you were in direct contact
with him at that time.
..."
(E-mail from Caruana to Moore, 1 Dec. 2000)
1974 - Caruana takes credit
for an article she did not write, but which was written solely by
Mae Brussell (see Feb. 1974).
"I met Mae Brussell ...
and began to work with her. We wrote an article about the Patty Hearst
kidnapping, "Why Was Patty Hearst Kidnapped?" and
sold it to a small Berkeley underground newspaper, the
"Berkeley Barb." ... The very week the Berkeley Barb story appeared on the
stands, threatening to blow the cover off of this story,
Donald de Freeze and the "Symbionese Liberation
Army" of hapless stooges were moved to a "Safe
house" in the
L.A. area, and a L.A.P.D. "swat team" was
brought in to turn them into toast, first making sure Patty
Hearst and her government-paid handlers were safely out of
harm's way. The Berkeley Barb's owners received an offer
they couldn't refuse, and sold out." (E-mail 24 Aug.
1995)
Feb. 1974 - Mae Brussell's
article "Why Was Patricia Heart Kidnapped?" is published
in The Realist. Caruana's name appears no where as co-author.
Apr. 1974 - Caruana meets Mae Brussell and
completes an interview with her that resulted in the article
"Inside the Hearst Kidnapping" by Mae Brussell and
Stephanie Caruana (The Berkeley Barb 1974 - #18). The
interview would reveal that Caruana has very little knowledge of the
events described in the original Gemstones.
Aug. 1974 - The same month, a Caruana
interview of Mae Brussell appears in Playgirl entitled "About
Women..."
Late Summer 1974 - For "a few
months" in late summer and early fall is the time period when
Caruana first saw Roberts' original letters, in the possession of
Mae Brussell. (See 24 Sep. 2001). How does this square with her
statements that she knew Roberts in 1970 and 1972?
"Jim,
I think you may recognize my name. I have been aware of you
since 1985 or so, when you started to publicize yourself as
the author of the Skeleton Key to the Gemstone File.
"But
I want to point out that I wrote the Skeleton Key early in
1975, using current Bruce Roberts letters as my main
source, and I doubt that you were in direct contact
with him at that time.
...
"Anyway,
I didn't start this letter to kid around, but to tell you
that I am doing a new book, which will contain a fairly
large amount of the original Roberts materials that I have.
I am aware, as many people are not, that Roberts's stuff was
spread around to a lot of people over a lot of years, in
sections, before his death in 1976. (I knew him in
1974-5)." (E-mail from Caruana to
Moore, 1 Dec. 2000)
This same year, apparently, Caruana moved from the
Boston area to California and it was then, she says here, that she
first met Roberts, through Brussell:
In
December, 1974, Playgirl magazine published an article I
wrote called "Is Howard Hughes Dead and Buried Off a
Greek Island?" The article was based on my reading of a
section of Bruce Roberts' Gemstone file in the possession of
Mae Brussell, together with other sources. I
subsequently moved to San Francisco, met Bruce Roberts, and
through him, had access to his more recent letters.
(E-mail from Gary Buell 22 Sep. 2001, based on a public post
Caruana made 21 Sep. 2001 to a JFK site)
Another writer with whom Caruana briefly conversed
was Martin Cannon, who was skeptical both of Caruana and the Key, as
well as most conspirologists. Cannon asks, "How did Caruana
gain access to the Roberts letters?" then answers his own
question:
How did Caruana first gain
access to the Roberts letters? Through a fascinating,
frustrating lady named Mae Brussell, the legendary queen of
conspiracy research. Brussell created the Gemstone File -
literally: She was the one who placed Roberts’ letters
into a manila folder and wrote the word “Gemstone” on
the tab.
"I do not know enough
about Stephanie Caruana to determine whether she fits the
“lonely outsider” profile (although that phrase seems to
fit Bruce Roberts well enough).
(Exposed at Last: The REAL Gemstone File by Martin Cannon -
2001)
- Note in the following that Roberts started sending his
material to Mae Brussell in 1972 - not to
Stephanie Caruana, who didn't even meet meet him
until 1974 - after she met Brussell.
This admirable career took an
odd turn in 1974, when Caruana helped Mae Brussell to write
about the Patty Hearst kidnapping, arguing that intelligence
agency “plants” manipulated the Symbionese Liberation
Army into actions discrediting the left. Their published
views prompted SLA leader William Harris to respond with a
tape-recorded tirade against “White, sickeningly Liberal,
paranoid conspiracy freaks.”
- Playgirl’s editor suggested that the team
should next try an article on Howard Hughes. While
researching this project at Mae Brussell’s home, Caruana
happened upon a cache of letters from the enigmatic Bruce
Roberts. A regular Brussell listener, he had, since
1972, been sending the broadcaster his conspiracy-oriented
monographs. Brussell had even met with Roberts in
San Francisco, later describing him as a “Casper
Milquetoast” type. She didn’t encourage her protégé to
take the letters too seriously. According to Caruana:
[Mae] “ordered” me
to not actually read the letters, but only to
skim over them, and only to read what related to
Howard Hughes! At midnight, exhausted
after a long hard day, I started to read. The
first page was chock full of murders, poison,
and dirty words. My reaction was: Hey, this guy
is a paranoid schizophrenic. I’ve been told
all my life about them. In a sense, I had been
brainwashed to automatically reject anyone who
talked about the things he did, in the ways he
did it. I had to pull back and take a look at my
reactions, and to decide that I would read the
material with an open mind. It all held together
- from first to last page.
She eventually broke with Brussell, and
visited Roberts. He struck Caruana as a real-life James
Bond, living in a world of spies, assassinations and tapped
phones - hardly a “Milquetoast” type. Roberts convinced
her that he had indeed invented a synthetic ruby used in
laser research, and that he often sold artificial gemstones
to foreign governments in exchange for secret data. “It
was,” Caruana averred, “a worldwide information network
on the highest level.”
In short: Caruana became a convert. The
Skeleton Key - her concise rendition of the world according
to Roberts - was her protestation of faith. (Exposed
at Last: The REAL Gemstone File by Martin Cannon - 2001)
Dec.
1974 - "Is
Howard Hughes Dead and Buried off a Greek Island?" is
published in Playgirl w/Mae Brussell and Stephanie Caruana as
authors. No mentionis made of Bruce Roberts or Aristotle Onassis;
Caruana later claims they were "edited out" and she was
then fired.
I
wrote another article with Mae Brussell, entitled "Is
Howard Hughes Dead and Buried off a Greek Island?"
In its original form, it gave a broad picture of the
manipulation of the U.S. government for private gain,
including heroin traffic, arms trading, gambling in Cuba,
etc., and fingered Aristotle Onassis as a major player in
the global money-power game.
Although the article which appeared had been very
much watered down and edited by Playgirl's attorneys, it
still lit up some dark areas that were supposed to remain
dark. Result:
I was fired as a contributing editor; Marin Milam,
the Editor, was fired, and Playgirl was "bought"
and subsequently changed hands a couple of times before
reemerging as a magazine of no particular relevance."
Early 1975 - Caruana claims
she gave Paul Krassner a copy of the Key and that she
"knows" this was the copy published in Hustler in
February 1979, then almost immediately retracts her statement, after
realizing Krassner has denied her story..
Your
story about Larry Flynt's stealing "your" work and using
it in Hustler, and your unsuccessful suit against him, is somewhat
hilarious, since I know he got the Skeleton Key from Paul Krassner,
(at least, the copy he finally used), who got it from me early in
1975, when I sold him a copy and insisted that he give me $3 to
cover the printing cost! (You're right; you should have settled for
the $2000.) Bruce Roberts was there at the time, and he dragged Paul
over to me and told Paul to get a copy. Paul was working for
"Hustler", as you may know; in fact, he was the
"guest editor" for at least one issue. Paul remarked to
me, on that date, that Bruce Roberts was "a pain in the
ass," and I'm sure he was, to many people. But boy, could he
write!
[NOTE:
in a recent telephone call to Paul Krassner, he told me that he had
not given the "Skeleton Key" to Larry Flynt, so Flynt got
it elsewhere; but at that time, copies were flying all over the U.S.
and the rest of the world, and Flynt could have gotten a copy from
any source. And I expect that he received more than one, so realized
that Moore was not the "exclusive possessor" of this
information; in fact, if any of this happened, Flynt probably
realized what a phony Moore was.]
(E-mail from Caruana to Moore, 1 Dec. 2000)
Mar. 1975 - In another claim
(Dec. 1, 2000), Caruana says this is the date she first released the
Key.
"The Skeleton Key was
released by me while Bruce Roberts was in the hospital, in
March 1975." (E-mail from Caruana to Moore, 1
Dec. 2000)
-
With
regard to Mark Lane, after Bruce Roberts got out of the
hospital in March, 1975, he asked me to go with him to a
meeting at which Mark Lane was speaking. He asked me to
bring some copies of the Skeleton Key along, and to give one
of them to Mark Lane when he asked for "information
regarding the JFK assassination." I did so, and at the
proper time, tripped up to Mark Lane and popped the Skeleton
Key into his startled hands. I don't know whether he recalls
this, but I surely do! (E-mail
from Gary Buell 22 Sep. 2001, based on a public post Caruana
made 21 Sep. 2001 to a JFK site)
1 Apr. 1975 - This is the date
(April Fool's Day?) she is currently claiming (as of 2002) she
released the first Key.
"Various
versions of the Key have appeared and circulated since the first one I
wrote and released, which was dated April 1, 1975. I wrote three or four
"editions", dated in April, May, and June, of 1975, and either
gave them away, or sold them for $3.00, the cost of making copies. (from
Caruana’s website at http://www.gemstone-file.com/)
Aug. 1975 - City of San Francisco, a
small San Francisco tabloid, publishes the first version of the Key
in which credit is given to Caruana.
1977-78 - Caruana claims that Brussell,
"on a couple of her tapes [explained how it was that I got
familiar with the Gemstone stuff and then went on to meet
Roberts and work directly with him ..."
(E-mail from Caruana to Moore, 1 Dec. 2000) This would contradict
her claims of meeting him in 1970, shortly after she got out of high
school in the Boston area, and again in 1972 - before she ever met
Brussell. Not having the tapes referred to, I cannot verify the rest
of her claim about 1977-78.
There
are also two tapes of Mae Brussell's radio broadcasts dated
1977-8 in which she described working with me and how I went
on to write the "Skeleton Key" based on my
contacts with Bruce Roberts in 1974-5. Partial
transcripts are included in my book, or you can purchase the
tapes through Mae Brussell web sites. (E-mail from Gary
Buell 22 Sep. 2001, based on a public post Caruana made 21
Sep. 2001 to a JFK site)
1988 - Mae Brussell died of breast cancer.
What happened to her files? Martin Cannon claims to be in possession
of copies of 351 pages, upon which he bases his skepticism of both
Roberts and Caruana.
- Will the foregoing critique end the Gemstone
legend? Doubtful. Defenders have argued that Stephanie
Caruana created any problems in the Skeleton Key, problems
that the original letters would surely resolve. As long as
they remained unread, the ur-texts provided the perfect
foundation for a conspiracy theory, since invisibility
granted them immunity from criticism or counter-argument.
They became, in the mind’s eye, anything the reader wanted
them to be. For a quarter-century, aficionados have
speculated as to their contents, much as New Testament
scholars speculate about the long-lost “Q” document -
but no-one, outside a handful of people, truly knew.
Until now.
In order to explain how I acquired a copy
of the letters, I must first recount some history that may
strike many readers as only tangentially related.
Many readers mistakenly refer to
Caruana’s Skeleton Key as “The Gemstone File,” despite
the fact that Caruana clearly explains, in the first few
paragraphs of her work, that she has boiled down the content
of roughly 400 handwritten pages, housed within one of Mae
Brussell’s file cabinets. Even that number was but part of
the whole: According to Caruana, Roberts compiled at least
1000 manuscript pages, outlining his view of the Grand
Conspiracy. No-one knows what happened to the other 600-odd
pages; someone probably trashed them after the author’s
death, although Caruana reportedly holds a tiny sampling.
(She has not shared them.) The surviving letters are the 351
pages - the actual number, as it turns out - sent to
“Conspiracy Queen” Mae Brussell. These pages constitute
the actual Gemstone file.
When Mae Brussell died in 1989, her
friends, followers and heirs faced a dilemma: What to do
with her research materials? She had amassed over 40
well-stuffed four-drawer file cabinets, along with dozens of
large cardboard boxes brimming with correspondence,
notebooks, un-filed newsclippings, pamphlets, and monographs
- not to mention innumerable magazines representing the
entire range of political opinion, from left to right to
off-the-map. There was also the not-inconsiderable matter of
a specialist’s library compiled by a world-class
bibliomaniac. Even her detractors grudgingly admitted that
her collection, containing many obscure and unusual items,
deserved preservation. Among those rarities, of course, was
the original Gemstone File.
Following her death, there was an attempt
to create a “Mae Brussell Research Center,” headed by
fellow left-wing conspiratologist, John Judge. Alas, this
project imploded due to the otiose paranoia of her
associates. Detailing those battles here would serve no
sensible purpose; suffice it to say that Brussell provided
her disciples with both a rudder and an anchor - absent
which, the ship carrying her life’s work could only
founder.
Brussell’s materials passed into the
hands of her long-time friend, mail-order bookseller Tom
Davis, of Aptos, California. In 1994, the collection moved
to Santa Barbara, California, where Davis tried to establish
a “Brussell Library” in the bottom floor of an elegant
old office building he had purchased - a building which
needed expensive repairs and attracted an insufficient
number of paying tenants. Once it fell out of his
possession, Brussell’s files and books passed into the
care of writer Virginia McCullough. Though McCullough never
knew the “Conspiracy Queen” personally, she does similar
work on the world wide web, and possesses sufficient storage
space. There the collection rests.
I tried to help Tom during the difficult
1994-1995 Santa Barbara period. With his permission, I
gained access to the Brussell files, and spent many a night
reviewing the work of a woman some hailed as a genius and
others derided as a crank. Her “paper trail” revealed
many fascinating ideas and ahead-of-her-time insights,
liberally sprinkled with shards of crackpottery; it was the
million-page autobiography of an exhaustingly original
thinker confronting bizarre times. Had we known each other
personally, we surely would have fought. I still wish I had
known her.
A search for the fabled Roberts letters
revealed that the actual Gemstone File no longer rested in
the manila folder marked “Gemstone.” The original
manuscript pages, handwritten on sheets of varying sizes,
have gone missing; Mae Brussell apparently returned them to
Bruce Roberts. Before doing so, she had photocopied the lot
onto legal-sized sheets, and Tom kept those pages
sequestered and safe.
Jim Keith’s popular 1992 compilation
volume, which presents the Skeleton Key and various
commentaries, created a market for the original letters.
Those letters, I suggested to Tom Davis, deserved a public
airing, and might translate into a book that could help him
financially. They required transcription and editing, of
course. Tom seemed of two minds about the proposal - and
when he finally produced the fabled Roberts cache, the
reason for his hesitation became clear.
I had expected an expansion of the Caruana
precis, containing details, organized materials, a
discussion of sources, and comprehensible writing. While I
always doubted that the letters could offer a persuasive
argument that Onassis killed JFK and Howard Hughes, I had
hoped that Roberts would, at the very least, present his
weltanschauung in a more-or-less lucid fashion, and that he
would offer some discussion of his mysterious informants. In
short: I hoped for the makings of a publishable book.
Alas, as I flipped through page after page
of Roberts’ quirky (but mostly legible) handwriting,
certain facts became clear:
1. His alleged sources of “inside”
information would remain as nameless as ever. In all
likelihood, they never existed. (In one letter, Roberts
claims that he sold a synthetic ruby to a foreign country in
exchange for the diary of Aristotle Onassis. He never
describes this diary, never quotes from it, never reveals
its location, never names the country that held it, and
never hints at a knowledge of Greek.)
2. Many of the allegations mentioned in
the Skeleton Key have no echo in the original letters. The
precis presents a more complete conspiracy theory than does
the original text!
3. Most importantly, the letters confirm
the suspicions of the Skeleton Key’s more level-headed
commentators: Bruce Roberts was severely mentally ill. He
was not merely neurotic, foolish, wrong-headed, eccentric,
fanatical, odd, single-minded, silly, mistaken, paranoid or
any of the other adjectives commonly used to describe
conspiracy buffs. He was insane.
Not even a whisper of proof backs his many
grand claims about himself. There is no evidence that he
personally determined the course of elections, that his
writings paved the way for Chinese entry into the U.N., and
that the Hughes corporation stole his method of creating
synthetic rubies. Anyone familiar with the writings produced
by schizophrenics will immediately recognize Bruce
Roberts’ repetitive, shapeless “brain-dump” literary
style. (Excerpts from his letters, below, demonstrate his
delusional state.)
After I finished reading, disappointment
set in. Obviously, Roberts’ mad missives could do nothing
to help Tom Davis’ cash crunch. Not even the tiniest
publishers would touch this material - and even if such a
book somehow hit print, word-of-mouth would kill sales.
In the end, one can only laugh at the
absurdity of it all, the way Walter Houston laughed at the
close of Treasure of the Sierra Madre. The Gemstone
“thesis” had circled the globe. For many people, it had
become an article of faith. The hidden oeuvre of Bruce
Roberts provided that faith with its foundation. And his
logos now stood revealed as the howling of a lunatic. (Exposed
at Last: The REAL Gemstone File by Martin Cannon - 2001)
Apparently Cannon gained access to Tom Davis' Gemstone copies in
1994-95, as did Caruana, and used these to make his own critique. Cannon next not
only verifies the experiences of many who have been on the receiving
end of Caruana's nasty temper, he goes on to reveal that Caruana is
not what she claims to be. Cannon says Caruana confessed to him that
she did not, as claimed, get her information from the Roberts
letters "but in her conversations" with him. This may
explain some of the many contradictions and inconsistencies in
Caruana's stories over the years:
- A couple of years after I acquired the
“real” Gemstone File, I wrote to Stephanie Caruana. She
now heads a society devoted to proving that Edward de Vere,
Earl of Oxford, authored the plays attributed to
Shakespeare, a position which gained semi-respectability
after Sir John Gielgud adopted it. (With all due respect to
the late Sir John, I’ve read the pro-Oxford arguments, and
remain a Stratfordian.) Naturally, she asked for proof that
I possessed a copy of the true Roberts letters; a detailed
description soon convinced her. Our brief e-mail
correspondence quickly turned acrimonious when she heard my
plans to tell the truth about her hero’s mental state. But
before breaking off communication in a snooty harrumph, she
confided that much of the information in the Skeleton Key
derived from her conversations with Roberts, not from his
writings. That explained much. (Exposed
at Last: The REAL Gemstone File by Martin Cannon - 2001)
 Interestingly,
Cannon makes some comments about the one page which Caruana, in her
new book, allows us to see. She claims it is the cover. Cannon
claims it is page 187. Clearly someone is mistaken.
- Page 187 constitutes the masterpiece of
the Gemstone File. Words cannot adequately describe its
unsettling aura of psychopathology. Much of the page
features a photocopied portrait shot of Joan Kennedy (at the
time, Senator Edward Kennedy’s wife), as originally
printed in Good Housekeeping. Above it, Roberts reproduces
the magazine’s masthead, then pens in the following
indicia: “PUBLISHED BY HEARST CORP. WE SQUAT ON BUSTED
NOSE MARY JO’S U.S. GRAVE.” A crudely-drawn word balloon
makes Mrs. Kennedy announce, in massive letters: “WE ATE
MARY JO’S LIVER!” This announcement is followed by
smaller lettering: “Teddy and me and the U.S. of Mafia.”
- Roberts surrounds his memorable graphic
with a great deal of tiny handwritten marginalia. The words
scroll across the page both vertically and horizontally.
Anyone who has ever studied the unusual messages printed on
bottles of Dr. Bronner’s soap will experience déjà vu
upon seeing this page of the File. But even Dr. Bronner’s
essays sound more rational than the following aria - which,
apparently, is meant to represent the thoughts of Joan
Kennedy:
- “Hearst (Kennedy blood
pact -- 1934) printed images of Rosie, Jackie,
and me (Madonna-style look). Hearst printed the
Carfarkis’ Onassis story in order to establish
JFK’s angry phone call to Jackie (“Get off
Onassis’ yacht, on the planned double. Diem -
JFK murder day - Nov. 1, 1963 -- as a “polite
letter.” Onassis ate the livers of Hampton and
Clark - in Chicago - after Chappaquiddick -
because they knew of the aborted JFK Chicago
murder. I love Hearst. Cafarkis - Onassis’
former bus boy - is now a millionaire - hotels
on the Riviera. I love Cafarkis. And liver.”
- “Mary Jo’s intestines
were chopped into hors d’ouerves - wafers for
brave, free Americans who support us and will
vote me queen. Courtesy of Ma and Pa Kopechne,
who clutch Cushing’s crosses saying “We
don’t care if it was murder. We are
satisfied.” On to Fatima 3 -- blowoff of other
heathens who eat the livers of their victims.
Convert them to our way - or kill them.”
- From this point forward, Roberts -
whether speaking as “Joan” or in his own voice - seizes
upon the “liver-eating” leitmotif with all the zeal of
Dr. Lecter:
- I write this from my
psychiatrist’s couch. Regardless of what
Hearst prints - here we let it all hang
out. These are notes to my psychiatrist who is
out of the room at the moment. Onassis tells me
I can eat Hearst’s liver when all this blows
over - and my psychiatrist’s. “No
witnesses,” says he. Onassis says my college
roommate, Joan Tunney, gets out of her English
nut house soon and that she enjoyed eating her
husband’s liver after she chopped his head
off. Onassis says she gets to eat the livers of
everybody at the nut house. “No witnesses”
again, in case they heard her speak of John
Tunney’s first Chappaquiddick phone call from
her home outside San Francisco. (In S.F., Alioto
made Police Chief Cahill a security guard at the
phone company to sit on those phone call
records. Back east, Publisher Loeb got Hoffa out
of the clink by promising Nixon to burn all his
card copies of the Chappaquiddick calls). During
the middle of his Mafia trial, Alioto shocked
the jury by eating barbecued girl liver -
Newsom’s nieces, Pelosi’s daughters - plus a
roasted Japanese liver, the nurse.
- And you thought that scene in Monty
Python’s Meaning of Life was just a joke! Later, in the
same corpulent paragraph, we find this:
- Onassis, of course, ate the
livers of JFK, Diem, and Nhu. (Captain Nung did
it for Onassis on Diem and Nhu at a Cholon
railroad crossing. Nung is now big with Thieu,
and Thieu is big with Montini, Onassis and
Dickie - and that’s as big as you can get.
Where can you go after the top of the Vatican
and the top of the Mafia? Working together?
Well, where? The man on the cross? -- 2000 years
ago the Romans pinned him on a cross - speared
him in the liver, and pulled on it and ate that.
Tacitus sneaked records of the action out of
Rome in 64 A.D., and Nero burned the town. They
burned His 11th Commandment - “murderers on
the cross, not me” - retained His skinny
skewered body as a symbol of submission - and
today you can get a symbolic bit of Christ’s
liver in any church.
- Later still, the undying paragraph
offers this noteworthy sentence:
- Onassis was gonna give some
of JFK’s liver to his Turk blackmail friend,
Mustapha, when he walked down the gangplanks in
Turkey with JFK’s wife, Jackie, my
sister-in-law, on his arm - just after JFK’s
call to Jackie, “Get off that yacht if you
have to swim.” - but frightened Jack John
cancelled his Chicago Stadium speech that day -
Nov. 1, 1963 -- and Onassis didn’t get JFK’s
liver until 3 weeks later at Dallas, via Maheu
(who was still smarting from his earlier failure
to assassinate Castro for the CIA Onassis
branch) -- and he was so hungry he ate the whole
thing.
- No doubt he did so with fava beans and a
nice Chianti.
- Believe it or not, the above-quoted
paragraph goes on for another two pages. History does not
record Ralph Nader’s reaction. When the mighty screed
finally ends, Roberts takes us on an even stranger
interlude:
- EDITOR’S NOTE: This is all
Joanie gave us on that date. However, we had a
spy hiding behind a moosehead and he tells us
that the psychiatrist came back into the room
and Joanie handed him the notes quoted above and
the psychiatrist read them and then Joanie said,
“My problem is that the constitution says
murder and treason and bribery are hanging
offenses and yet we do these things daily and
fuck dead people and eat liver and we get
elected queen. I’ve learned to love liver and
Teddy says he can live with it - meaning being
president - and - what is that you’re eating
doctor? It looks a lot like 2000 year old liver
-- 1972 years to be exact, and well-aged, and
marinated, and tenderized by a spear hole. Is
that - the real thing? Lover!” and she leaped
from the couch, drooling, and they embraced in a
frenzy, chewing their way, opposite sides of the
most prized of all livers, toward ecstasy. We,
as impartial observers, do not feel that we
should report the private actions of consenting
adults in the privacy of their own offices and
so our observer behind the Moosehead withdrew -
at that moment. We do know that they did not
eat each other, like Pyrrahna fish, because we
saw Joanie later and she gave us a copy of all
those letters, documents and volumes that
Roberts sent to Teddy. Buy our next edition.
OBSERVER BEHIND THE MOOSEHEAD’S
NOTE: We do not consider the actions of consenting
adults in public to be subject to invasion of privacy -
in the case of the necrophiliac fucking of Mary Jo on
her Pennsylvania grave. An entire nation is there -
drooling and fucking - Presidents and Priests, Senators
and Judges - everybody, including Ma and Pa Kopechne.
Hearst is out there now. And if I don’t hurry the
crowd will be so huge I’ll have to stand at the
Pennsylvania border and hump whoever is in front of me.
And, with my luck, that would be Onassis.
JANITOR’S NOTE: Hearst and
Moosehead rushed out of here drooling - on their way to
fuck some Pennsylvania grave dirt - and forgot these
papers. And I have something to add. I’m 98 years old
and sweep up around here and flush shit. My greatest
thrill is going to the bathroom. The relief...[End of
page; next page missing] (Exposed
at Last: The REAL Gemstone File by Martin Cannon - 2001)
Cannon goes on to call Roberts insane, which he may
indeed have been by this time. Yet, like so many others, Cannon
makes no effort to research the wild man's claims. His work is more
an examination of the personalities of both Caruana and Roberts, as
well as Brussell to some extent. He wonders whether both Caruana and
Brussell may have covered up Roberts' "insanity" so as not
to disgrace themselves - and diminish the money to be made. However,
as noted elsewhere in this timeline, Brussell ordered Caruana not to
read the letters, except for the very narrow part involving Howard
Hughes. Caruana obviously disregarded this, in her own words, and
went on to claim sole credit for something she never bothered to try
to document. It has now backfired both on her and on everyone else
connected with this "alternative history."
-
- There may be some highly illuminated
conspiracy aficionados who will find the above passages
perfectly comprehensible. They are the lucky ones.
-
- One such aficionado, apparently, was
Stephanie Caruana. In all likelihood, she now considers me
an agent of the Great Conspiracy - or, as Bruce Roberts
might have put it, “a necrophiliac cancerous liver-eating
Mafioso from MMORDIS.” Even so, I can’t help feeling
sorry for her. She has devoted much of her life to
championing her two heroes: Bruce Roberts and Edward de Vere,
Earl of Oxford. Alas, the world will now know the truth
about Roberts - a truth which Caruana should have seen back
in 1975, before she foisted her “Skeleton Key” on a
public capable of an almost transcendental gullibility (to
borrow writer Jim Hougan’s delightful phrase).
-
- Her “Skeleton Key” stands revealed
as a hoax, since it never mentions Mmordis, mooseheads,
nonstop liver luncheons, Bruce Robert’s claims of personal
responsibility for Chappaquiddick and Nixon’s election,
and a myriad cognate inanities. In short, Caruana
deliberately and disingenuously covered up much of the
madness at the heart of the File. Throughout the past
quarter-century, she has refused to publish the few pages of
Roberts’ writings still in her possession. Now we know
why: Like other schizophrenics, he wrote in an impenetrable
stream-of-consciousness style best described as “word
salad.”
-
- Nevertheless, Caruana remains loyal to
the legend she created, and even plans to publish a book
furthering the cause of her beloved madman. I don’t know
whether she is driven by fanaticism, a desire for fame,
simple stupidity, or a crippling inability to admit that she
was fooled by a fruitcake. Perhaps some combination of all
those factors plays a part. Whatever her motives, her
continuing insistence on marketing this myth crosses the
line separating gullibility from culpability.
-
- The actual words of Bruce Roberts - an
alcoholic with a brain tumor and hallucinations of
importance - should now cause all Gemstone aficionados a
great deal of embarrassment. But I doubt that Stephanie
Caruana is capable of feeling embarrassed. True zealots
rarely are.
-
- Poor Stephanie. Maybe the Oxford
business will work out better for her.
(Exposed
at Last: The REAL Gemstone File by Martin Cannon - 2001)
1993
- Virginia McCullough takes over the Mae Brussell Archive,
apparently from John Judge, and claims the original Bruce Roberts
letters are missing. Other people, perhaps as many as five total,
were also curators at various times. Question: can any of these
people verify the points in time at which the Gemstone letters were
known to have been in the archive, thus pinpointing the time of
their disappearance?
"The
Mae Brussell Archives were placed in my possession in 1993, five years after Mae
died. The files had been moved several times in the five years preceding
their being placed in my trust. The two files cited were not in the files
in their original state as has been described by those who had seen them prior
to their removal from Mae Brussell's home. I have been unable to
locate even one letter allegedly written by Bruce Roberts or any original
document written to William Torbitt.
26 Dec. 1994 - James
Daugherty, curator of a-albionic forum and press, who has been in
communication with Caruana for some time says "I don't think it
(the Key) is true. It is even hard to find parts of it that are
true. ... She [Caruana] claims to still have some of Bruce Roberts'
notes and pamphlets, but she seems to insist on a way of making
money on them before she releases them!"
22 Jun., 1995 - Leaves a-albionic
forum after criticism from a-albionic curator James Daugherty. She
claims "As some people may know, I wrote a short summary of
Bruce Roberts' letters back in May 1975, to which I attached
the name A Skeleton Key to the Gemstone file.'"
22 Aug. 1995 - In response to
a reader's question "Does anyone know how [Sherman] Skolnick or
any well-informed researcher feels about the Gemstone
Thesis...", Caruana replies:
"Well...I don't know how
Skolnick feels, or whether I would qualify in your book as a
'well-informed researcher,' but I did write the 'Skeleton
Key to the Gemstone File' which is generally circulated as
the Gemstone Thesis...so I probably know more about this
than most people. I think Bruce Roberts was right, although
the tale he tells, being from his point of view alone,
perhaps leaves out certain other factors which have been
mentioned and stressed by others." (E-mail
1 Dec. 2000 - Caruana e-mails Moore, calling
him "a liar." Because of the hostile nature of her letter,
I felt no compelling need to even respond to it.
December
01, 2000
Hi--
I
hope I am writing to Jim Moore, at the Tenn Times.
Jim,
I think you may recognize my name. I have been aware of you since
1985 or so, when you started to publicize yourself as the author of
the Skeleton Key to the Gemstone File.
You and I both know
that you didn't write it, because I did. I seem to remember that at
some point, you wrote that Bruce Roberts had dropped off some
handwritten sheets on your desk in Chicago, in the late 60's. That
might be true, as I know Bruce was quite generous in spreading his
writing around, and was writing and distributing his information at
that time, hoping someone would pick up on it. And for all I know,
you may have used some of his material in your articles written
then.
But
I want to point out that I wrote the Skeleton Key early in 1975,
using current Bruce Roberts letters as my main source, and I doubt
that you were in direct contact with him at that time.
I
gather from what you have said about your life story, that you have
suffered to an extent, perhaps partly as a result of claiming this
authorship: jail, threats, etc. (On the other hand, you apparently
had the fun of participating in the
Senate Hearings, under false pretenses.) I have had some
problems too, but not to the extent of going to jail for it, and for
this, all I can say is, "better you than me." I was
keeping quiet at the time, because I wanted to keep on living.
Your
story about Larry Flynt's stealing "your" work and using
it in Hustler, and your unsuccessful suit against him, is somewhat
hilarious, since I know he got the Skeleton Key from Paul Krassner,
(at least, the copy he finally used), who got it from me early in
1975, when I sold him a copy and insisted that he give me $3 to
cover the printing cost! (You're right; you should have settled for
the $2000.) Bruce Roberts was there at the time, and he dragged Paul
over to me and told Paul to get a copy. Paul was working for
"Hustler", as you may know; in fact, he was the
"guest editor" for at least one issue. Paul remarked to
me, on that date, that Bruce Roberts was "a pain in the
ass," and I'm sure he was, to many people. But boy, could he
write!
[NOTE: in a recent telephone call to Paul Krassner, he told me
that he had not given the "Skeleton Key" to Larry Flynt,
so Flynt got it elsewhere; but at that time, copies were flying all
over the U.S. and the rest of the world, and Flynt could have gotten
a copy from any source. And I expect that he received more than one,
so realized that Moore was not the "exclusive possessor"
of this information; in fact, if any of this happened, Flynt
probably realized what a phony Moore was.]
I
think, since 3 books have come out since then identifying me as the
author of the Skeleton Key, and since Mae Brussell explained quite
clearly on a couple of her tapes back in 1977-8, how it was that I
got familiar with the Gemstone stuff and went on to meet Roberts and
work directly with him, that you may have toned down or perhaps even
abandoned your claim to be the author of the Skeleton Key. But there
are still copies of a page you wrote, probably some time ago,
identifying yourself as the author, and promising to put forth
volumes of material in support of it, floating around on the web.
And
I would really appreciate your putting in a little time checking
this out, and notifying the people who are still using this old page
that it is not exactly accurate, or however you want to put it, and
asking them to remove the page, or change it. I found this old page
up on a website just the other day. You can find the reference(s) if
you look up: "Gemstone file author" on Google.com. or I
suppose any other search engine.
This
particular Web page listing says something like "reveals the
identity of the author of the Gemstone File" or something like
that, and it has your life story in it, including this one
"highly inaccurate" bit.
This
might avoid some confusion, I think. My identity is as precious to
me, as yours is to you. And it is unnerving for me to think that
there is someone around who publicly includes something I did, in
his life story. I am sure you will understand that.
You
mentioned somewhere in the page I looked at, that the CIA had done a
silly book, "Beyond the Gemstone File," I think it was
called, in order to attempt to make the Skeleton Key look like a
travesty. (I saw that book, and in fact, I used to have a copy of
it, but it's gone now.) You were quite right about that. I see that
they have also been "busy" with muddying the waters
surrounding your "Phoenix Foundation" name. I think the
funniest one (that I saw on the first or second page of the returns,
and that's as far as I went), is the "Phoenix Foundation"
building construction company. I can just imagine the yucks some CIA
flack had in "constructing" that site, which is
"informational" about the ins and outs of building
foundations.
Anyway,
I didn't start this letter to kid around, but to tell you that I am
doing a new book, which will contain a fairly large amount of the
original Roberts materials that I have. I am aware, as many people
are not, that Roberts's stuff was spread around to a lot of people
over a lot of years, in sections, before his death in 1976. (I knew
him in 1974-5).
At
one point, in 1970 or so, Roberts referred to "4
telephone-book-sized" piles of manuscripts that had preceded
his current writing. I have a stack the thickness of about 1
telephone book, (we are not talking small-town-in-Tennessee phone
books here), and I know there is a lot that I don't have.
Many
people destroyed their copies, and others may have stashed them. If
you still have any of the originals (xerox copies, that is), I
wonder if you could dig them up and send a copy to me. I have this
desire, foolish though it may be, to try and assemble as much of the
original material as possible.
What I have dates from 1970-1972, and again, 1974-5--about
400 pages in all.
In
return, I will send you if you wish a copy of the new book as soon
as it is available. I think you will find it very interesting.
As
Spock used to say, "Live long, and prosper!"
Stephanie Caruana
21 Sep. 2001 - In a public
post e-mailed to me by Gary Buell, Caruana repeatedly calls Moore
"a liar":
-
I
have always given full credit to Bruce Roberts for the
information in the Skeleton Key; but I wrote the Key, not
Jim Moore.
-
I
doubt that "Moore worked with Roberts briefly in
Chicago," primarily because Moore has been lying about
writing the Skeleton Key since--whenever he started. Roberts
states that he began distributing copies of the File in
1969, but he refers to local politicians in S.F., and never
refers to making a trip to Chicago in the sections of the
file that I have, which date from 1970-72 and 1975.
-
Jim
Keith, who published one of the first books on Gemstone,
"The Gemstone File", in 1992, forwarded to me a
copy of a letter he had received from Jim Moore after the
book had been published, in which Moore made his absurd
claim. Jim Keith's book included interviews with me. There
are also two tapes of Mae Brussell's radio broadcasts dated
1977-8 in which she described working with me and how I went
on to write the "Skeleton Key" based on my
contacts with Bruce Roberts in 1974-5. Partial transcripts
are included in my book, or you can purchase the tapes
through Mae Brussell web sites. I don't believe Jim Keith
ever decided that Jim Moore wrote the "Skeleton
Key," but since he is dead now, he can't speak for
himself. I suppose that's why Jim Moore's anonymous friend
feels "safe" in making that false claim.
-
I
have an account of Larry Flynt's attempts to verify the
"Skeleton Key" information in my forthcoming book.
Moore has been promising to "upload hundreds of pages
from the Gemstone File" for decades now, and he never
has. The reason is, I expect, that he doesn't have any.
Perhaps he hoped to put his own writings up and claim that
they were Bruce Roberts'. But I doubt that he has the talent
or the knowledge to be able to do that. (E-mail
from Gary Buell 22 Sep. 2001, based on a public post Caruana
made 21 Sep. 2001 to a JFK site)
24 Sep. 2001 - A person
(believed to be Caruana) contacts Virginia McCullough, curator of
the Mae Brussell Archives, requesting "voluminous"
material. The description matches Caruana in multiple ways. Note
that McCullough is careful to avoid mentioning the sex of the person
making the inquiry; this is usually done only when that person is
female. Caruana was indeed at that time nearing completion of the
CD-ROM she is now selling. Caruana also matches the description of
the person having access to the files for the time period given.
Caruana was also e-mailing people accusing McCullough of withholding
the material.
"This person was working
on a book and was apparently close to finishing the
manuscript. The author had last seen the Mae Brussell
files for a period of two to three months in the late summer
and early fall of 1974. At the time the material
being requested had been contained in two large files whose
titles were supplied to me in the request. One month and
four days later this individual was e-mailing various
associates and my publisher stating that I was withholding
access to the archives from the inquirer.
"When I took five hours
to search for the documents requested last Sunday, I
found that no such files existed under the titles given to
me." (Virginia McCullough, curator of the Mae
Brussell Archive)
2002 - Caruana, on her web site, claims:
"Now for the first time ever... you
can see how the Gemstone file looked, as written and
originally distributed by Bruce Roberts." But then,
in the smaller print, she confesses:
-
"This is the first
appearance in print of a remarkable piece of prose writing. I
believe it will take its place in literature along with Jonathan
Swift's "A Modest Proposal" and Mark Twain's "Is
Shakespeare Dead?" This book reproduces Bruce
Roberts' original "title page" and script; plus edited
transcript."
Her 42-pages (for $20) includes mostly other
articles from magazines such as Texas Monthly 1999 - plus, of
course, her "transcripts." She openly admits that what she
is now presenting as "the originals" are little more than
her "interpretations" from various sources. She claims to
correct certain "mistakes" and adds "additional
information" which she claims is in brackets with footnotes -
but in her web site version there are no such brackets or footnotes.
Oddly, she still refuses to consult the most basic almanac to get
the spelling correct on the name of the late Washington Post
publisher Katharine (Katherine) Graham or Cardinal Tisserant
(Tisseront).
Of course, there's also a CD-ROM which, she
claims, has much more, but it costs more. The soap opera goes
on.
- The present version has been rewritten, to
include additional information or interpretations from the
Brussell section of the Gemstone File. I have added whatever
additional information I have gleaned from this source, as
well as some personal details of Bruce Roberts' life. I
have also included some more recent interpretations of
events.
-
- In a few cases, I have included information
not present in the Gemstone File, and not originating from
conversations I had with Bruce Roberts. I have put these
additions in brackets with footnotes regarding their sources.
One interesting comment: she
claims The present version has been rewritten, to include
additional information or interpretations from the
Brussell section of the Gemstone File. I have added
whatever additional information I have gleaned from this source,
as well as some personal details of Bruce Roberts' life."
Why would she be now taking
materials from the Brussell Archives - if that's what she
claimed to be presenting all along? And, of course, there's the
question of how she wound up with materials that were once in
the Brussell Archive, but have been missing since she was in
those archives.
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