Sex Crimes, Satanism, Snuff Films, and the Stasi

What If Everything You Know Is Wrong? An Unsettling Update.

Last week brought news of a shocking series of arrests in Australia. New South Wales Police announced the break-up of a Sydney-area gang devoted to the most odious of crimes, the sexual exploitation of children. Four men, ranging in age from 26 to 46, were taken into custody and are being held without bail, given the terrible nature of their alleged misdeeds.

This pedophile gang employed encrypted online apps to circulate images of sexually exploited and abused children internationally. Their victims included babies. The 26-year-old, identified as the independent journalist (and Lady Gaga superfan) Landon Germanotta-Mills, is considered the ringleader by detectives, therefore is facing a raft of charges, including the possession and distribution of child abuse material and bestiality material. One of the men, 42-year-old Mark Sendecky, a swim coach, was arrested in 2021 for possessing some 1200 sexual images of boys, some as young as five. Sendecky told the court four years ago, pleading for mercy to dodge a long prison sentence, that he knew he’d “got a serious problem that I need to fix.” Which he clearly did not.

Online pedophilia is depressingly common worldwide, yet what stands out in this vile case is how it was reported by NSW Police, whose special task force termed the Strike Force Constantine took the suspects into custody. The press release announcing the arrests depicted the pedophile gang as an “international Satanic child sex abuse material ring,” adding that Strike Force Constantine investigated them for the “online distribution of child sexual abuse involving ritualistic or Satanic themes.” Its chief detective told the media: “this international group were engaging in conversations and the sharing of material which depicted child abuse and the torture of children involving symbols and rituals linked to Satanism and the occult.”

The notion of a Satanic cabal of pedophiles harming children as part of occult rituals is ignored by most people, and nearly all mainstream journalists, as a low-information fantasy, something to be dismissed out of hand. There’s no easier way to get yourself uninvited to smart-set cocktail parties than to suggest that child sexual abuse linked to the occult is a real thing. Such lurid gangs can’t possibly exist, can they?

Alas, they can – and do. The arrests around Sydney are just the latest example of such horrors. Back in the 1980s, the so-called “Satanic Panic” discredited the notion of such terrible things existing, even though there remain real questions about some of those high-profile child abuse cases and what really happened, and nobody in the mainstream media wants to revisit any of those alleged horrors.

Whenever such salacious stories emerge, most journalists view their job as debunking rather than reporting. Why investigate what can’t possibly be true? To cite a somewhat recent example, almost a decade ago the “Pizzagate” scandal erupted online, amid claims that powerful people in Washington, DC, including top Democrats, were sexually abusing kids. Some of those said to be involved were close to the 2016 Democrat presidential nominee, Hillary Clinton. Online postings, usually anonymous, accused powerful people of very grave crimes, without anything resembling evidence. Nevertheless, Pizzagate enjoyed its moment and was pushed online by the far-Right, which led to its automatic debunking by the elite media as a laughable fabrication, indeed the essence of “fake news.”

For establishment figures, Pizzagate couldn’t possibly be true, therefore academic-sounding debunking was required. In fairness to the debunkers, Pizzagate devolved into bizarre claims of underground child-torture rooms and worse, in the heart of Washington, that were obviously false. Such nonsense nearly led to violent deaths when an armed nutball tried to “free the kids” supposedly trapped under the pizza joint by force. After that, Pizzagate evaporated, eventually to be replaced by QAnon in the pantheon of conspiratorial nut-Right gibberish that proliferated online during President Donald Trump’s rollercoaster first term in the White House.

However, at the heart of the Pizzagate saga lurked disturbing claims which possessed at least a degree of plausibility. It turns out that some of those Democrat-linked influencers really did post known pedophile symbols on social media, clannish criminal argot that was well known to the FBI. Some folks close to the Clintons used creepy code language in their emails that could be viewed as referring to sexually abusing minors. There was more than a whiff of the occult in some of the leaked emails. Did any of the players outed in Pizzagate sexually abuse minors? I have no idea. What I do know is that nobody of significance in the mainstream media ever bothered to investigate whether any part of said “conspiracy theory” might be true. Indeed, the one journalist who bothered to ask, Ben Swann, trashed his media career when he ran a segment at the CBS TV affiliate in Atlanta which considered Pizzagate a topic worthy of discussion.

I deemed Pizzagate a toxic farce in its brief heyday, given the dubious characters who pushed it, some of whom possessed links to the Kremlin (in a standard pattern, Ben Swann, having lit his media career ablaze, wound up working for Moscow spreading Russian propaganda). Then I asked an old friend in Washington about his view of the scandal, since our nation’s capital isn’t a very big place, socially speaking, and I knew that this friend was acquainted with one of the powerful Clintonistas caught up in Pizzagate. I expected a curt dismissal, but this friend stated that said individual personally was a “total weirdo” and my friend “wouldn’t be surprised at all if he was diddling kids.” It may, or may not, be coincidental that this VIP is a nearly lifelong close friend of Dennis Hastert, the longtime Republican Congressman from Illinois who served as Speaker of the House from 1999 to 2007, and who is also a convicted sex offender and pedophile.

Our establishment’s unwillingness to consider the existence of Satanic pedophile gangs, frequently including elites, amounts to a tradition at this point, one which shows no signs of disappearing. The Internet, however, makes hiding inconvenient questions from the public more difficult, perhaps impossible in the long run. In the late 1980s, a sensational affair broke in the Midwest, centered on Omaha, Nebraska, where a collapsed savings and loan was reputedly serving as a front for child sexual abuse on a nationwide scale, mainly homosexual but also involving female victims, allegedly even reaching the White House. This reportedly involved people close to then-President George H.W. Bush, amid whispers of connections to senior officials of our Intelligence Community. Its ringleader, a convicted conman, was a rising Republican star and the clandestine pedophile network appeared to have important GOP links across the country.

This became known as the Franklin Scandal after that failed savings and loan, while efforts to investigate and prosecute it ultimately collapsed, seemingly due to political pressure, amid a few mysterious deaths, allowing the media to dismiss it as just another “conspiracy theory.” The ugly saga appeared to involve at least dozens of victims (probably hundreds), aspects of the occult, plus rumors of snuff films, that is, video footage of a victim being murdered, sometimes ritually, for sexual thrill. Snuff films are reflexively deemed mythical by bien-pensants, but I have in fact encountered them in my intelligence career, more than once: I know they exist (though I don’t claim to know if the reputed snuff films in the Franklin Scandal existed).

The mainstream media simply buried the Franklin Scandal once the legal proceedings collapsed. No significant American media wanted to touch it. When a British media outfit took an interest, producing an hour-long documentary elaborating the alleged affair called Conspiracy of Silence, which amounted to a deep-dive into the pedophile allegations, the Discovery Channel abruptly pulled it before its scheduled nationwide showing in the United States in May 1994 (you can watch it here). As a result, the Franklin Scandal disappeared down the memory hole, unresolved. It was dismissed by the media and politicians as just one more “Satanic Panic” fabrication. The definitive work on this sordid subject is the 2009 book by the muckraking journalist Nick Bryant, who did the thorough investigation which our elite media refused to execute. I also recommend this 2019 interview with Nick on how he doggedly took up the story, despite a complete lack of interest by the mainstream media.

These days, in the wake of the Jeffrey Epstein mega-scandal, it sounds significantly less far-fetched to suggest that elite pedophile networks are raping and trafficking kids while providing VIPs with criminal sexual favors. In short, the Epstein network looks a lot like the Franklin Scandal, a complex web involving sexual abuse of minors catering to the well-connected. The differences include that Epstein’s rape outfit was mainly heterosexual, the VIPs involved included global elites, while the international dimension here is significant. The espionage angle to the Epstein scandal is also considerably more pronounced. Above all, thanks to the Internet and social media, it’s much more challenging for the legacy media to make the Epstein horror disappear, as they managed with the Franklin Scandal.

Jeffrey Epstein is safely dead, supposedly having killed himself in Federal custody in 2019, while his paramour, bestie, and co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell is behind bars, where she knows that talking will likely result in her “suicide” too. This newsletter has exclusively reported major aspects of the Epstein-Maxwell scandal, including how to think about its considerable espionage and kompromat dimensions, with detailed comparisons to the intricate global spy scam run by Maxwell’s shady father, ultimately another “suicide” case, during the Cold War. Let it be noted that Nick Bryant played a trailblazing role in getting the Epstein-Maxwell story reported, against enduring disinterest from the elite media, just as with the Franklin Scandal.

Epstein’s sexual crimes encompassed a strong occult aura too, including a mysterious gold-domed temple-like structure on his private Caribbean island, where he and Maxwell committed numerous sex crimes against minors. Here, again, there are rumors of snuff films. Some of Epstein’s victims seem to have disappeared. What exactly was in that massive trove of media, including video, seized by the FBI from Epstein alongside his 2019 arrest? Officially, it’s unknown, while after gaudily promising full disclosure, the Trump administration, led by Attorney General Pam Bondi, who claimed to have the Epstein files right on her desk earlier this year, professes to not know anything. There’s no reason to think that Washington will come clean about what it knows regarding Epstein’s network anytime soon, perhaps ever. Neither should we expect the media to hold this White House, or any, accountable for the full, ugly truth about the Epstein-Maxwell affair.

How many such elite pedophile networks are operating worldwide today? It’s impossible to say. However, there’s depressing evidence that they are more common than we like to think. It’s time to revisit a largely forgotten, terrible case of a missing child who is believed to have been abducted and coerced into prostitution, then murdered for sexual thrill. This affair generated considerable media attention in Germany when it happened, over three decades ago, yet it gradually faded out, unresolved, amid ugly rumors and worse.

His name was Manuel Schadwald, and he disappeared on July 24, 1993, at the age of 12, in his native Berlin. He left his mother’s apartment, headed to the neighborhood recreation center, yet never arrived. Officially, Manuel was never seen again. Thirty-two years later, his case remains unresolved, quite cold. His parents reported him missing, but the Berlin police initially treated the case as just another runaway kid, and didn’t overexert themselves with searching for him in the days after he went missing. By the time the cops got serious, the missing boy’s trail had gone cold. Whispers proliferated, amid media attention, but no firm reports of Manuel’s whereabouts emerged in the months following his disappearance.

The following year, sketchy information appeared which pointed to Manuel’s being coerced into the underground pedophile scene in the neighboring Netherlands, which operated behind the scenes in Rotterdam and Amsterdam. According to the rumors, the boy was effectively a hostage of wealthy gay child abusers, who paid handsomely to have sex with minors. As for hard information, the public never got any. The Berlin police effectively closed their investigation in 1998, amid belief that Manuel was likely dead – but how, nobody uttered on the record.

Decades later, it emerged that police and spies in multiple European countries by the mid-1990s believed that Manuel Schadwald was one of several boys who got sold to pedophile networks in Western Europe, resulting in their serial abuse and worse. They had credible reports, never shared with the public, asserting that Manuel was pimped out to wealthy clients in the Low Countries. His case was rumored to be involved with the pedophile cabal orchestrated by the notorious Belgian killer and sex criminal Marc Dutroux, who for years supplied underaged sex victims to European elites, including in the Netherlands. According to what European spies heard, Manuel’s ugly fate was caught up in Dutroux’s pedophile network, although the media was unable to confirm these spook accounts.

The Dutroux affair remains an ugly wound in Belgium and beyond, amid claims of unsolved murders (some of which appear to touch the Schadwald case). Very little has been firmly established at the unclassified level, due to the secrecy with which elite sexual abuse networks operate. According to high-grade rumors, Manuel met a terrible end, being murdered during ritual sexual abuse with an occult flavoring, moreover his killing was captured on film. In one telling of this, Manuel was slaughtered for a snuff film aboard a Dutch yacht, a crime which involved several wealthy men. The whole thing was covered up, including disposing of Manuel’s body at sea, to protect the VIPs involved. This sounds like a hideous fairy tale, the stuff of far-fetched nightmares, but the 1997 British documentary Boy Business includes the claim of just such a pedophile-caused murder at sea. Many believe this describes Manuel Schadwald.

European media wasn’t overly eager to investigate the possible murder of a boy by wealthy pedophiles who filmed it, although there are exceptions. I claim no direct knowledge regarding the Schadwald disappearance, although some years ago when I mentioned the case to a longtime friend, a senior German intelligence official, he surprised me by stating forthrightly that Manuel was murdered by wealthy pedophiles, and there was a film of it (although my friend didn’t clarify whether he had seen any such snuff film).

I asked my spook pal about Manuel because there are tracks of a tie-in with the espionage world in his terrible fate. In a bizarre twist, the missing boy’s father, Rainer Wolf*, turned out to have spied for the East German Ministry of State Security or MfS, the infamous Stasi. That was a highly capable, if nasty, service that did some frankly astonishing things during the Cold War. According to Stasi files which emerged after Communism’s collapse, Wolf worked in the 1980s as a collaborator or IM, spying on Protestant church circles (some of them rather close to future Chancellor Angela Merkel, whose own relationship with the Stasi remains surprisingly murky). There was more and worse. Wolf was valuable to the MfS because he had connections to the criminal underworld, including pedophile networks. For the Stasi, he reportedly compromised elites, including politicians, in West Germany with kiddie porn. The child victims were taken from East German state care.

For this reason, Berlin police considered that Wolf may have sold his own son to wealthy pedophiles. He was even taken into custody in 1998, but was quickly released by the cops. He protested his innocence, claiming a frame-up job, and professed his dedication to finding his missing son. Some 27 years later, Manuel Schadwald remains missing and presumed dead. How, we seem unlikely to ever know on the record.

* No apparent relation to Markus “Mischa” Wolf (1923-2006), the legendary head of MfS foreign intelligence from 1952 to 1986.

https://topsecretumbra.substack.com/p/sex-crimes-satanism-snuff-films-and