Daniel Hopsicker digs deeper to see what stinks in the 9-11 'Truth' Movement

October 6 2004-Venice,FL.
by Daniel Hopsicker


A MadCowMorningNews investigation into allegations that “Mar & Venus” author John Gray and Saudi Billionaire Adnan Khashoggi's bankrupt GenesisIntermedia.com has been used in an effort to spread disinformation about the 9/11 attack on the Internet uncovered evidence last week that the firm had numerous underworld connections.
Testimony in an extortion trial in Tampa, Florida, the MadCowMorningNews learned exclusively, fingered Michael Muzio, President of Genesis subsidiary http://www.opendoormusic.com as the intended victim of a Mafia hit ordered by a business associate, Joseph Forlizzo of Queens.

While the court transcripts offered no explanation for why Forlizzo believed Genesis exec Muzio 'had it coming,' when Officers of public companies need key man insurance against the prospect of being rubbed out it can be bad for business.

Meanwhile the controversy continued over the hugely-successful self-help guru's funding of the recent International Citizen’s Inquiry into the 9/11 attack, even as he finds himself drawn in with his Saudi arms dealer erstwhile partner in a growing financial scandal beginning to unspool in courtrooms across the country.


"The 'C'Mon Back' Scandal"

Dubbed “Stockgate” by business journalists, it involves massive looting and financial fraud, on a scale not seen since… well, since the last bout of massive looting and financial fraud in America, which informed sources indicate took place “not that damn long ago.”

The massive lawsuit was filed under the RICO racketeering statues in Federal Court in Minneapolis, and cites Gray for allegedly allowing use of his trading account in furtherance of the scam, which netted more than $100 million.

Despite the huge sum involved, the scandal at GenesisIntermedia is but a piece in a larger mosaic of dozens of companies being systematically looted by people recently characterized in Jack Anderson's column as “criminals, money launderers and terrorists.”

For whatever reason, associates of Gray & Khashoggi apparently feel they belong to a charmed circle of people who’ve gotten the 'high sign' from fiscal watchdogs in the U.S. to “back up a truck.”


"The One-Two Punch of Love"
Even as one of the best-selling authors of all time continues to spread money around to 9/11 'Truth Movement” principals, his business partner Michael Roy Fugler continues to pursue his lawsuit against us.

Wow. What'd we do to deserve that? The answer is almost too obvious for words. No one was bothering, or maybe capable, of hiding the flailing-about of third-rate scrubs denied more glamorous employment in their chosen field.

Still, John Gray apparently has strange and so-far unexplained connections to two Middle Eastern men "of interest" in the 9/11 investigation, both of whom reside in San Diego.

The first is a Saudi Professor who housed two of the hijackers, cited recently by Senator Bob Graham, Chairman of the Joint Congressional Intelligence Committee Hearings, as evidence of involvement in the attack by people working for the government of Saudi Arabia.

The second is an Iranian exile, running a network used to infiltrate hundreds of Middle Eastern men illegally into the United States, according to court documents. And the Saudi Professor is a likely candidate for membership in this network.

Until moving to California Iranian Sam Koutchesfahani had been a retainer to the Shah. He's been one busy expatriate ever since. Faster than you can say "Savak" he was running a network used to infiltrate Middle Eastern men into the U.S., while also finding time to hang out with the Heaven’s Gate cultists, 39 of whom died in his mansion in the wealthy San Diego suburb of Rancho Santa Fe, in March of 1997.


"Can't we see the replay before we decide?

Is it coincidence that a man running a ring slipping Middle Eastern men into the U.S. also rented out a 'safe house' to cultists ramping up for a launch towards Hale Bopp and the Level Above Human?

We know what they'd say on NFL Sunday: "You make the call."

But anyway you slice it, its a small world. Even John Gray knew cult leader Marshall Applewhite, apparently, back in Houston Texas where both made their home in the 60’s and 70’s. And the cult's Internet Service Provider may also have links to Khashoggi's fine family' of companies, all of whom carried the word "Genesis" in their name, which we've dubbed "Saudi Genesis."

Our mind protested. John Gray is the best selling author in the Solar System, responsible for annual revenues totaling more than the budgets of countries with seats at the United Nations.

He would certainly have been heavily scrutinized by dozens of journalists. If he knew the dopey Applewhite, wouldn't it have surfaced before now?

Similarly, the Heaven’s Gate cult was the news for several weeks when it occurred seven years ago. What could remain hidden after that kind of media saturation?

Apparently…a lot.



"It's Iowa, but with a beach."
But first… a brief introduction to the swirling intrigue in San Diego…

The clue which would eventually lead to a ‘protected’ network came from researcher Kelley Cooke http://researched.blogspot.com/ who tipped us to a man we’d never heard of before, Sam Koutchesfahani.

It was our first exposure to Koutchesfahani. News crews made his mansion so recognizable after the Heaven’s Gate suicide that neighbors eventually voted to change the name of their street to deter lookie-loos.

Even Sam, we discovered, has since also changed his name.

Sam is from an Iranian family close to the Shah of Iran, stated wire service reports. He’d moved to San Diego after the Shah was deposed. Sam’s San Diego network, we learned, paid bribes to dozens of college and university instructors for bogus student transcripts then used to help insert hundreds of middle eastern men, most of whom were anything but students, into the U.S. under the guise that they were.

Both were in the same business. The connection between Sam and the Saudi Professor is an obvious inference to draw. The flying school the San Diego terrorists patronized was also run by an Iranian, Fereidoun Sorbi, like “Sam the Sham” an exile in San Diego.

Maybe this connection hasn’t occurred yet to the FBI. They've said nothing about the network, which they appear to have “overlooked” during their “massive” investigation into the biggest crime in US history.

Another case of FBI bungling? It could be their silence owes something to the fact both men were the FBI’s “own.”

Like Rudi Dekkers, both Saudi Professor Abdullah Shaikh and Iranian ‘facilitator’ Sam Koutchesfahani were confidential informants for the FBI's San Diego office. And “colleagues” of the Professor were named in court documents as having been paid off by Koutchesfahani. The 9/11 Commission Report hinted the two that lived with the Saudi Professor may have arrived via these same connections.


The Saudi “Professor,” now retired, taught at a bogus “University” in San Diego which no one seems very interested in probing, run by the same people who awarded “Dr.” John Gray” his—we almost said bogus but stopped ourselves—his much-disputed “PhD.”


How amazing is that? Saudi “Professor” Abdullah Shaikh is so well protected by the Bush Administration that they wouldn't even let the FBI serve a subpoena to compel his testimony before the Intelligence Committee investigation into the 9/11 attack, even though it was the only subpoena issued by the congressional inquiry.


Maybe Senator Graham should have tried calling the "Make A Wish" Foundation.

“That was a smoking gun,'' Graham said, although inexplicably no one in the media was paying him any attention. “The reason for this cover-up goes right to the White House.''


"You're not cleared for any of that information."

We were entering territory considered “too sensitive” for the American people to know about. We were mucking around on the edges of the 27 blank pages in the Congressional Intelligence Report.

It was all very "Hush Hush." For example, while the Saudi Professor’s case is discussed in the text of the 9/11 Commission Report, he is not mentioned once by name.

“Hamzi and Midhar finally found a room to rent in the house of ‘an individual’ that they met at a mosque in San Diego,” the report says. “According to the ‘homeowner’…

The 9/11 Commission report of this story sets a new record, we realized while reading it, for most lies packed into a single sentence in a government document. A high degree of difficulty was involved. Its like participating in a “record drug bust in Florida.”

There’s a lot of stiff competition out there.

“The housemate who rented the room to Hazmi and Mihddar (two of the 19 hijackers) is an apparently law-abiding citizen," lied the report, "with long-standing friendly contacts among local police and FBI personnel….who saw nothing unusual in (their) behavior to prompt him to report to his law enforcement contacts.”

FBI counter intelligence informant Abdussattar Shaikh hosted two of the hijackers while providing more than enough information for San Diego field agents to request an investigation.

But FBI headquarters refused the plea from a San Diego FBI agent to investigate the two hijackers-in-training. They increasingly seem to us to have been operating on some other agenda which has not yet been fully explained to the American people.


Simple FBI incompetence doesn't cut it as an answer when you've been cited for incompetence as often as the FBI has without your motives coming legitimately into question.




A comet, sure! But with a spaceship in its tail!

Is there anything about author Gray, other than his association with Khashoggi, which leads to any question of his truthfulness?

Biographies of Gray have him being born in Houston, Texas, in, variously, 1950, 1951, or 1952.

After high school he attended St. Thomas University and the University of Texas before "hooking up" with the Maharishi.

Thus Khashoggi and Gray both have backgrounds which fit nicely with last week's theme of “cultish involvement” in a 9/11 “Truth Movement” chock-full of people who slip sometimes still slip and say "data crystal" when they mean "diskette."

A profile of Gray called “TOWER OF PSYCHOBABBLE; HEALER OR HUCKSTER?” in TIME magazine revealed that the cult’s guru, Marshall Applewhite, had known John Gray’s mother, who owned of a New Age bookstore in Applewhite’s adopted hometown of Houston.

Gray fired off a letter of protest to TIME making the point that anyone who ever walked into her bookstore could be said to have “known” his mother. But conspicuously absent in Gray’s angry letter to the editor were any indications that Gray himself might have known Applewhite, a dead ringer for My Favorite Martian.

John Gray was a student at the tiny University of Saint Thomas in Houston, we discovered, while Applewhite was still teaching there while becoming embroiled in a messy scandal involving a homosexual affair with one of his students.

“Born in Houston, Texas, in 1951, after high school Gray attended St. Thomas University and the University of Texas,” begins Gray’s author biography. Curiously, his most recent bios leap right past this sticky wicket entirely, going from his being awarded a high school diploma—the only undisputed educational credential he apparently possesses—to his nine years as private secretary to the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, where he became one of the first TM'ers to 'fly,' (or bounce) during meditiation.


A total psychic re-construct

Enter Marshall Applewhite, complete with his trademark weird beady eyes. Two strands most stories highlighted about Applewhite were his conventional religious background and his torment about his homosexuality.

“The University of St. Thomas in Houston hired him as an associate professor in 1966. He became a driving force behind the university-sponsored Houston Festival Chorus and at one time was head of the music department,” said The Toronto Sun.

“St. Thomas fired Applewhite in 1970 for what the college called "health problems of a mental nature," reported a Houston Chronicle story headlined “Leader was recruited here; Nurse told him God had kept him alive."

A call to the University of St Thomas’s Admissions Office in Houston, where Gray was a student at the same time Applewhite was getting into trouble for rubbing a few male students the wrong way, elicited the information that there were at most a few hundred students at the school at the time.

We think its likely Gray and Applewhite knew each other. It was a bad time for at least one of them.

“His particular crisis came in 1970, when university administrators learned Applewhite was in a relationship with a male student and asked him to leave,” read one local news account.

The firing followed a homosexual affair he had with a student, confirmed the Washington Post. “Suffering from depression and shame, hearing "voices," (Applewhite) then checked into a hospital, asking to be "cured" of his homosexual desires,” reported the Post.

Marshall Applewhite fled to a psychiatric hospital in such disgrace that he must have felt only a total psychic makeover would do... Was Heaven’s Gate the ultimate result?

During psychiatric re-programming Applewhite met a New Age nurse and amateur astrologer named Bonnie Nettles. Apparently they “bonded.” Maybe Applewhite saw her as offering a way out.


"Hot pants in Heaven"

“My mother was involved with all of this back in the early '70s when it all started -- back when I was just a kid, 12 years old," said Bonnie Nettle's son after the Heaven’s Gate mass suicide.

He remembered a gathering at Applewhite's Montrose-area residence: "He had some people over there, and I noticed they were kind of strange. Some of the guys wore makeup, hot pants, a lot of weird things. And I didn't know what a gay person was."

So the re-programming may not have been totally successful.

Straight guys don't wear hot pants.

In an apparently unrelated development Gray left Houston at just about the same time for Switzerland, where he became—for the next nine years--the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi's private secretary.

Was there been something in the mental conditioning Marshall Applewhite received at Bellaire Hospital in Houston which set him on his future course?. In the millions of words written about the cult in the wake of their mass suicide, we couldn’t find a single news report that raised this question, despite the fact that mass cult suicides raise serious questions about possible brainwashing or mental programming.

We were so shocked we decided to commit journalism. What the hell, we figured...

We could always raise bail.


"Break on through to the other side."

We come now to the defining episode, apparently, in John Gray’s life. He describes it often, in interviews, in seminars and in his infomercials. It concerns the death of his father, and when we heard about the story it sounded too weird to be true.

So we checked it out. And, guess what? It is too weird.

Gray grew up in the well-to-do River Oaks section of Houston, Texas…

John was “one of seven children of a well-to-do oil executive who died in 1985 after hitchhikers robbed him and locked him in the trunk of his car. His mother ran a spiritual bookshop and knew Heaven's Gate cultist Marshall Applewhite,” says the TIME profile Gray found offensive.

Here’s the story from a sympathetic newspaper profile in the Dallas Morning News:

“It was 1985, and Gray had just gotten remarried. He and his bride, Bonnie, were honeymooning in Canada when he got an urgent phone call from his mother in Houston. His father, David Thomas Gray, had been found dead in the trunk of his car.

A retired oil executive, David Gray was a good Samaritan who enjoyed doing charity work. He also had a habit of giving rides to hitchhikers. One stifling hot day in July, as David Gray drove to Nacogdoches to visit relatives, he picked up a couple of hitchhikers.

"They robbed him and left him in the trunk," John Gray says. "I guess they thought he might chase them. He wouldn't have. He'd been happy to give his money to them, and he did."

Someone, perhaps one of the hitchhikers, placed an anonymous call to police to report the abandoned car. "But the police didn't get the directions right," John Gray says.

Finally, Virginia Gray called police when her husband didn't show up in Nacogdoches. "She described the car, and they found it, and he was dead in his trunk. He died of heat asphyxiation in the Texas sun. He cooked in there. It was very traumatic."

As the family gathered in Houston for the funeral, John Gray acted on an unusual impulse. "I wanted to get into the car and see what happened. It just sounded so horrible."

“He crawled into the trunk and closed the lid," reported the paper. "He could see where his father had taken a screwdriver and banged on the hood. He also noticed that the tail light had been pried open, apparently for air. John Gray pushed his hand through the opening.”

"My brother said, 'See if you can reach the button from there.' I went outside with my hand and reached around to the button and opened the trunk."

John Gray's face betrays only a trace of irony. "So that was another layer in the whole thing. He could have reached the button and let himself out. He wasn't a stupid guy _ I'm not a stupid guy. But when you're inside the trunk, you're panicking and trying to get out, you don't think about how you would get in. You have to have a different perspective to see that."

It was as if his father had left him one last valuable lesson, he says. "And that was, there are so many problems in this world where people are locked in trunks, and they just need a different perspective. You need to go on that other side to solve the problem.

"And that's kind of what I feel I've done with 'Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus'.


"I'll paint any car for $39.95!"

A Gray associate’s website drives home the sales pitch. “If only their father had thought of this, he would still be alive,” wrote Kathy Gates, Professional Life Coach, at http://www.reallifecoach.com

“But it took his brother on the outside to notice the button. The lesson? Sometimes you have to step outside the situation you feel trapped in to see that you're not trapped after all.”

Even leaving aside for a moment the horrible tackiness of using the death of your father as a sales tool, we had some problems with this. So we began to make inquiries.

We learned that the incident had happened in Nacogdoches, Texas, a small town thirty miles outside the middle of nowhere. Robbie Goodrich, the editor of the local paper, remembered the incident.

“I don’t remember too many details. I remember the police never did classify the death as a homicide. He was somebody that liked to put himself in strange situations or something.”

Robbie kindly dug through the paper’s computerized files, and found a story about strange deaths unsolved murders and unusual deaths over the past 25 years in Nacogdoches County.

“David Thomas Gray — July 5, 1985 — “Gray’s body was found in the trunk of his 1973 Mercedes off U.S. Hwy, 59 south of Nacogdoches,” stated the story, which ran on July 12, 2004.

“The death was ruled accidental, as Gray evidently died from asphyxia due to suffocation and heat exhaustion. Family members said Gray had gotten into his trunk before just to see if he could get out.”

Well now. This was curious, and warranted further investigation.

A guy gets carjacked, locked into a car trunk, and dies of asphyxiation… And the death’s not ruled a homicide. Hmm. A few phone calls later we were speaking with former Sheriff Joe Evans, who had worked on the case.

“He died in the trunk of his BMW, that’s right,” he told us. “He was rich and had retired, and supposedly spent all his time pretty much driving aimlessly around. According to the family he’d locked himself in the trunk before, just to see if you could get out,” Evans stated.

So he hadn’t been carjacked?

“He was not robbed,” Evans said. “He had all his credit cards, his wallet, and plenty of cash when we found him. So robbery was not a motive.”

Don’t carjackers usually rob their victims?

“The case has always puzzled me,” he admitted. “You could see the family were all highly intelligent and very well-educated. But they were really strange. It seemed like they all had completely different lifestyles, and there was no cohesiveness, they seemed to be al going off in different directions. It was the most dysfunctional family I’ve ever seen.”

We told the Sheriff the outlines of the story Gray tells, about his dad being a good Samaritan and getting carjacked, and the police not being able to follow directions and get to the car in time.

“None of that would be true,” he said slowly.

So what did he think happened?

Sheriff Evans said he didn’t know. “We know what his movements were. He’d visited someone here, stopped at an ATM, got gas and a quart of oil. One family member made the comment that it was typical of his father to have done something like this. So in the absence of any evidence to the contrary. The death was ruled accidental. But what he did has never made sense to me.”

When a homicide detective in Houston drove out to the mother’s Aquarian Age Bookstore to relay the news that her husband had been found dead, he found her reaction to be strange.

“She was having a meeting in the bookstore, and when the detective told her husband had been found dead, her reaction was to ask him if he could come back later, after her meeting was over. The detective told me he told her that’s not the way it worked.”

The death remains a mystery. Before hanging up, the Sheriff asked us to get in touch with him if we found anything out.


Karma Chameleons in the CIA

“You know, in a lot of unsolved cases, we’re still in touch with the family years later. There’s no closure. But they seemed like they just wanted to pick up the body and forget about it. Its not like they were calling us all the time wondering if we’d found any leads.”

Then we discovered a statement about John Grays’ father made recently by Canadian talk host Barrie Zwicker, who is reportedly now in business with Gray, and so a seemingly credible source.

Apparently there has been some talk that David Gray had worked for the CIA.

“John has a personal life history which I think helps explain why he would become a 9/11 skeptic,” wrote Zwicker. “He has reason to be deeply suspicious of the power elite. His father, a Texas oil millionaire, tried to warn the authorities in Dallas, prior to Nov. 22, 1963, that JFK's life was in danger. He had heard the rumors circulating.”

In our next story we’ll profile the dozen or so companies that together comprise “Saudi Genesis.”

All have the name Genesis in their name, all are owned or backed by Khashoggi’s network. Some are involved in things having nothing whatever to do with commerce.

But we’ll close this story where it began...with attorney Michael Roy Fugler.

It was Fugler who’d incorporated Genesis, and Fugler who later led the effort to take it public .In yesterday’s email, we received a notice that Fugler is right now taking another company public. The press release was mostly routine. Everyone had nothing but nice things to say about each other…

Michael Fugler, Chairman of US EURO Securities, Inc., stated, "The…story is a fresh and compelling one…”

The company’s President and CEO, Dominique Einhorn, stated, "We are privileged to be associated with US EURO Securities..."

The only thing unusual about the press release is the name of the company ‘ol Michael Roy’s got hisself involved with now: "Karma Media.”

We’re choosing to see this as an omen.

A sign from the ether. A message from the Other Side.

Just for today, Fugler’s “Karma” has once again proven to our satisfaction the existence of an Almighty Creator, that, yes! There is a God.

And He even has a sense of humor.