My Adventures
By Wade Frazier
Revised July 2008
Learning the Truth about the Easter Bunny
Hitting Rock Bottom and Meeting Dennis Lee
Make Them an Offer They Can't Refuse
My childhood had a significant bearing on my adult experiences. From an early age, I was taught that I must leave the world a better place, or my life was not worth much.
I was gifted in science and mathematics, and assumed that I would be a scientist. It did not turn out as planned. I had a mentor of international reputation who was an engineer and inventor. His inventions revolutionized some industries, and some were so revolutionary that they were suppressed. One invention was considered the world's most effective engine for powering a car. Another was a bomb that eliminated most conventional warfare without harming people (quickly suppressed by the Pentagon).[1] Another was a circuit that revolutionized the electronics industry and earned the man who stole the invention the title of "Electronics Design Man of the Year."[2] Although a government study devoted about $10 million to analyzing his engine, it went nowhere, partly due to auto industry inertia. During the excitement over his engine, one high-ranking official told him that if he really thought his engine would make the internal combustion engine obsolete, he had better start making his funeral plans.
I was a teenager when my mentor invented his engine. I had visions of revolutionizing the energy industry and ending the insanity of producing energy by raping the planet. That was in 1974. What I could do about the world's energy situation when I was sixteen, I had no idea. I held the dream for many years and had the chance to try making my dream a reality. For that alone, I feel fortunate.
In the meantime, I was graduating from high school and going to college, studying chemistry. Chemistry was my second love, an affair that began at about age twelve, after an infatuation with paleontology that began when I was eight. I had vivid dreams about the elements, such as a dream about gallium. In my second year of college I had the existential crisis that many young people encounter, and decided that life in a chemistry lab was not for me. For the first time in my life I felt lost. If I would not become a chemist, what would I do? I flailed around for months, seeking a direction.
I had been introduced to the paranormal and spirituality a few years earlier. After forty hours of meditation training at age sixteen, I had dramatic experiences that demonstrated that everybody has innate extrasensory perception abilities, and there is far more to earthly existence than meets the eye. From that moment forward I became an avid student of spirituality. When I was a teenager, studying Jesus’s life and (what is now called) channeled material, I wondered what practical use any of it would be, but I was enthralled. Colleges did not offer degrees in mysticism and it did not pay the bills, but I have never studied anything as enthusiastically.
I was nineteen, and had dropped my organic chemistry, calculus and physics classes, knowing that my life would not be lived as a scientist. I went from the top of my class in college science studies to dropping all my classes. I felt that I was careening toward disaster, a rocket wildly off course, not knowing where I would crash. One night, after months of futility, I hit rock bottom. Although I had meditation training and was studying spirituality, I had never really prayed, at least in the standard way. That night, as I lay in bed, I beseeched with all my soul for somebody to give me a clue. I had never experienced a "higher power" before, and although I had studied spirituality intensely, I was not sure that anybody would hear my plea. My plea was this: "If anybody can give me a hint about what to do, I desperately need your input. Please give me a sign, I beg you."
I fell into a dreamless sleep. The next morning as I lay in bed, looking across the room, my first waking thought was a voice speaking inside my head. The voice said, "Have you ever considered studying business?" I had nearly no idea what the voice was talking about. "Business?" I thought. "That sounds like a great idea, but what is it?"
My only academic perspective at that time was studying "important" subjects such as chemistry and physics, or "loafing" and studying English, history or social science. I had no idea I could study business in college. My father's career was spent working for the government. I called the counseling center at my college and said, "Are there any classes at your college where you study business? Is there such a thing as a degree in business?" I had been following a science/math curriculum throughout my academic career, and had about zero knowledge of the business world. The only thing that I knew about accountants was hearing about them on the news every April 15th. The counseling center said, "Sure, we have a business curriculum. We have business counselors here. We will set up an appointment for you for next week." I was on my way.
The next semester I took Introduction to Business and Bookkeeping 101. Bookkeeping appealed to my mathematical mind. My professor said that accounting paid well. I was introduced to the business world and capitalism. I was taught that accounting was the language of business, about how superior capitalism was to communism, and how business was a great force of light in the world. I learned about Adam Smith in my economics classes. I was taught about the wonders of free markets and the invisible hand of competition. In my idealism I ate it up. My zeal for learning and my talent was fully brought to bear upon my business studies.
During my next year of business studies I worked as a janitor, cleaning the offices of attorneys, accountants, investment advisers and other businesses. I retrieved the Wall Street Journal and other business publications from the trash and read them. I was seeing how business could be an ideal vehicle to serve one's self and humanity. I was over-idealizing the situation. I was not completely naïve, remembering the "make your funeral plans" comment my mentor received. Yet, I was a babe in the woods. I began playing the stock market with my savings, playing the capitalistic game at age nineteen. I played casino stocks, short sold, bought options and started to play the commodity futures game. I was gambling with my college fund. Somehow, I just about broke even in all my gyrations, with thousand dollar swings in one day.
I was at the top of my class in my business studies. I decided to pursue an accounting degree. I attended a community college for my first three years, and then attended a university. There were national accounting exams given to university students. I got the highest score in the university's history. I went from being the chemistry prodigy to being the accounting prodigy, but my last year in college wore me out. I became fed up with academia and the rote exercises that can be found in every college curriculum.
I graduated in 1981, during the worst recession in forty years. I went to college in California where I was raised, but I was originally from Seattle. I wanted to go home, and did. A fresh California graduate did not have a prayer of getting into the Seattle Big Eight firms (the world's largest and most prestigious accounting firms, as of 2008 only four are left) during a deep recession, one that hit the Washington State economy hard.
After a sobering experience of working for a small CPA firm in the winter of 1982 and being laid off a few weeks after April 15th, it became more important to pursue the proper career path than live where I wanted. I moved to Los Angeles and joined a Big Eight firm. My winter spent working at the small CPA firm was a brutal introduction to the profession, but working in downtown Los Angeles was a deep dive into the "real world." It was a trial by fire. Those were my life’s unhappiest years.
In America, downtown Los Angeles is the most conservative business district west of Manhattan, and as one of seven hundred professionals in my office I was thrown into a dog-eat-dog world. Those recruits fresh from college, as they began their CPA apprenticeship in the Big Eight, were called "Grunts," "Lambs to the Slaughter" and other terms. I traveled throughout the Los Angeles region, spent several months on audits out of town, and worked in Skid Row Los Angeles for several months. I experienced events such as passing by a dead Mexican-American man on the sidewalk as I was walking to lunch, having sneezing fits for months because the air pollution was so fierce, being accosted by beggars every day and so forth. I became street-wise.
I was the first male in my family in a hundred years who did not serve in the military, but I experienced the corporate version of it. The regimentation was extreme. A mystical, non-materialistic vegetarian was a misfit. I was required to eat at restaurants everyday, and being a vegetarian was less acceptable than being a homosexual in the environment I worked in. I gave up being a vegetarian to work there, which affected my health. I was virtually forced to drink alcohol, and developed a bad habit that I gave up in 2000.
The lambs were assigned mentors in the firm's hierarchy to help groom their careers. The sage advice I received from my mentors (they were trying to help me, and I liked them) was that my shoes were not shiny enough, I was not dazzling them at the phony weekly cocktail parties, and if I wanted to get ahead at the firm I had to crawl over the bodies of my peers.
The people I worked for, particularly the men (there was not one woman partner in the office when I began) who had attained the lucrative and coveted position of partner, nearly all looked at least ten years older than they were. Many drank heavily, and I could not imagine living their lives. Their average income was $150,000 per year (in 1983, in 2008 it is more than $300,000). Many peers were determined to make it, and trampling each other on the way up came with the territory. It was the most impersonal and least friendly working environment I have yet encountered.
The environment was bad enough, but what constantly nagged me were the challenges to my idealistic vision. I was not very bothered by the "I drive a BMW, therefore I am" mentality that I saw in my peers, but I had difficulty seeing how our audits benefited society. The collision of indoctrination and reality was a harsh one. I was taught that auditing provided a valuable safeguard against the excesses of capitalism. By auditing corporate America we insured that accurate financial statement information was available, which helped ensure fairness in the capital and financial markets, but I was having a hard time seeing it. I eventually discovered how valuable auditing really was.
I did not know what auditing was when I graduated from college. Part of adjusting to the “real world” was making sense of my income and how much the firm received for my efforts. During my final year in college, I worked as a cook and dishwasher in a “greasy spoon" restaurant, making $3.50 an hour. With a diploma in hand, I made more than $9.00 an hour and was being billed out at $39. My first “busy season” (the winter months, when year-end audits are performed for corporations) was spent making photocopies, running errands and adding up columns of numbers. I was part of an army of auditors at a huge bank. Alongside me at the photocopier was a peer who had recently received his MBA at USC, and it was also his first busy season. He had the same disturbed sense of wonder that I did. Being an MBA, he was being billed out at $42 an hour. One day, after a morning spent at the photocopier, he said, “That stack of copies just cost the client more than a hundred dollars.”
The idealist in me tried making sense of my place in the scheme of things, and wondered how I was contributing to society, particularly in light of the money attending my efforts. I knew the party line about auditing being good for the business world and a benefit to society, but it was difficult to see it from the trenches.
When the busy season was over, there was a one-week training class for the new junior auditors. Near the week's end was a “quiz the partner” session. A partner came to class and answered any question we had. We put our anonymous questions in a basket.
Among the standard questions for the partner ("How much do partners make in the LA office?") was mine: "How does auditing increase the world's real wealth?"[3] There was a snort or two, then everybody began giggling in genuine humor, and I laughed with them, the question was so out of place. If somebody could have spoken for the group mind at that moment, it would have been approximately, "How delightful! Somebody still believes in the Easter Bunny."
The partner put on a straight face and gave the standard answer that auditing helped provide reliable financial information for the business community, so better investment and business decisions could be made. A couple of years later I was on an audit with him, and saw how he really felt.
I was with him on a savings and loan (S&L) audit. He talked about an audit that our firm performed that exploded in our faces. As auditors, we issue "opinions" on our client's financial statements, and it is published on the client's annual report and their filings with the SEC (Securities and Exchange Commission). The opinion approximately reads: "We audited XYZ Corporation’s financial statements and found them to be fairly presented in accordance with Generally Accepted Accounting Principles." In other words, we audited them and found them playing by the accounting rules. That is what we received a million dollars for, which was the standard fee for a large corporate audit in those days. Today, it is several times more.
The audit opinion can state that the client played fairly, while the financial statements themselves show a company in peril. That is not an audit failure, but if a company gets close to failing, there is a "going concern" principle that states if the company appears that it may soon fail, the auditors should qualify their opinion. A qualified opinion is always bad news and auditors rarely issue them.
An audit "exploding in our face" means that the auditors issued their standard unqualified opinion, and the company soon capsized. Auditors are not fortunetellers, but if a company fails a few months after issuing "healthy" financial statements, and there is an unqualified audit opinion accompanying their statements, the auditors are often sued for a negligent audit. In some ways an audit is a crapshoot, because a future event that nobody foresaw can capsize the company, but the "deep pocket" theory means that shareholders and others left holding the bag will try extracting money from somebody for the business failure. That is a risk of being an auditor. Partners physically signed the company's name to the audit opinion with a pen and ink. Every partner learned how to sign opinions with a signature that looked like every other partner's signature.
There we were, auditing an S&L that had exploded in the faces of our predecessor auditors, and that partner who reassured me about the "Easter Bunny" was looking at our firm’s audit opinion of a different company that we audited that exploded. He said, "That signature looks a little shaky to me." It was a joke about the partner's state of mind while signing the opinion, inferring that he knew that the opinion he was signing would someday haunt him.
Learning the Truth about the Easter Bunny
There was an inherent conflict in my indoctrination versus reality. As auditors, we theoretically rendered independent opinions on our client's financial statements. Our clients paid our fee and could choose another auditor if they wished. I did not understand that situation's implications in my early days. I was just trying to survive. In 1984, something happened that eventually made it clear. I helped audit one of the world's largest savings and loan (S&L) institutions. During my first two years at the firm, I periodically heard a cynical sentiment regarding the worth of auditing, and no auditor ever relied on another auditor’s work, but I had yet to understand. That S&L audit eventually made it clear. We were brought in to audit the S&L immediately after the previous auditors had been fired. We were on a "high exposure" audit. "High exposure" meant that the likelihood of the auditors being sued was high.
The previous several months had seen that highflying S&L run out of money. They were posting record revenues and profits, until one day they were unable to pay their creditors and depositors. Then it all came crumbling down. Suddenly, those record profits appeared illusory. There was a 1930s-style bank run, and the federal government stepped in to keep the S&L’s doors open. The S&L's shareholders filed a huge lawsuit against the previous auditors. I was the junior auditor on that "high exposure" audit. On such audits, my firm flew in real estate and banking experts from our offices across the nation, and managers and partners did the work usually performed by the lambs. I coordinated hotel rooms, rental cars and the audit’s administrative logistics. I was also the right hand of the partner running the audit. The senior manager who worked for him (who made partner a couple of years later) was my direct supervisor. Those two men were some of the nicest human beings I ever encountered in public accounting. The reason they were on that audit was probably because they were such nice guys. People were not exactly volunteering for the job. I was a lost waif in the office when I was assigned to that S&L audit. Although I was low man on the audit's totem pole, they treated me as if I were a peer - better than I was ever treated in the LA office.
On my first day there, my manager briefed me. He said, "As usual, you can make the numbers say whatever you want to until the money runs out." I had heard it before, but did not really understand it. That S&L became one of the highest profile and earliest meltdowns of the entire Savings and Loan Scandal. The S&L had concocted bogus transactions to hide their losses. By itself, that was not the crime of the century, but was common corporate activity, unfortunately. Our job was making sure that did not happen, applying Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (called GAAP in the profession) to their books. As we began our audit, it became obvious that our predecessor auditors had allowed their client to bully them into signing off on fictitious financial statements.
The gist of the problem was this: the Holy Grail of capitalism is profits. Corporations only exist to make profits for their owners. I have seen numerous instances of corporate executives making this sagacious statement: "Gentlemen, you must not forget that we are not in the business of (fill in the blank; I have seen everything from "producing eggs" to "treating patients" to "making cars"), we are in the business of making money."[4] That has been repeated endlessly in corporate halls as a motto to never forget.
With the profit drive being the ultimate reason for a corporation's existence, corporate managers have incentive to report the largest possible profits. There have been principles of accounting, such as the conservatism principal, the revenue realization principal, the objectivity principle, the matching principle and many others that supposedly guide accounting practices, so profits are not overstated. The Big Eight's very existence depended on laws passed during the 1930s in the wake of Wall Street's collapse and the Great Depression, designed to ensure those events would never be repeated. Our job was keeping corporations honest in reporting their profits.
At the university, my auditing professor told us why the Big Eight partners made so much money. He said it was because sophisticated professional judgment was required to render an independent audit opinion. My professor said that such highly qualified professionals, with their sophisticated auditing practices, which entailed numerous levels of review, did not come cheaply. He said if the government took over the auditing profession, they would create bureaucratic guidelines so that a monkey could do an audit. They would produce substandard audit results and the profession would be ruined. With no other frame of reference, I believed it.
On that S&L audit, even I could see that our predecessor auditors were signing off on ridiculous accounting practices, which a lamb could have spotted. How could a highflying Big Eight firm, with its highly paid, pin-stripe-suited auditors, approve such phony financial statements? After a month on that audit, the partner in charge, my manager and I went to lunch. The partner said, "If you look at what (our predecessor auditor) approved, it is shocking. Yet, if we had been in their shoes, I doubt we would have done any differently." He was the nicest partner I ever knew, and his candor that afternoon helped me figure it out.
His statement did not fully sink in until years later, when the Savings and Loan Crisis became headline news in 1988. That partner said that the predecessor auditors had been bullied into approving bogus financial statements. How could they be bullied, with all those accounting standards, levels of review, and highly honed professional judgment? To put it bluntly: by a million-dollar audit fee. If an auditor proved too stubborn in applying GAAP to the S&L's financial statements, the S&L would merely hire a more pliant auditing firm. For a million-dollar fee, the partner who lost the account because he refused to see the financial statements the client's way could ruin his career.
A few years before that audit, the CPA profession was partly deregulated. The "free market" ideology of the time, exemplified by Ronald Reagan and his administration, created the acceptability of doctors, lawyers and CPAs to begin getting "competitive," advertising and taking business away from each other. It brought capitalistic principles to the professions.
The notion of CPA firms rendering "independent" audit opinions became a farce. Those were the go-go years for Reagan's boys. Greed was a virtue in 1984. Michael Milken, Ivan Boesky, Donald Trump and other capitalistic heroes dominated the scene. By 1984, only two years after Reagan deregulated the savings and loan industry, the eventual outcome was evident for those with eyes to see. What we saw on our audit was typical throughout the industry. That S&L was merely one of the first to run out of money. What my manager said was true: as long as a company has money, it can get compliant auditors to sign off on virtually any financial statement. For a million-dollar audit fee, independence disappears.
That crime was far greater in the S&L industry. Take an industry such as energy, for instance. In theory, if Exxon fails, its shareholders lose their money (this was originally written in 1998; I could have inserted “Enron” for Exxon). At least that is the theory. Capitalism, profits and market discipline are nice ideas, but when a corporate giant is imperiled, our government rescues them with taxpayer money. The government bailouts of Lockheed and Chrysler were notorious in the 1970 and 1980s. USA government interventions have also propped up industries such as steel and semiconductors (in 2008, dramatic interventions are attempting to prop up the USA’s financial industry, once again). In theory, shareholders take the risk if the business fails. In banking however, with deposit insurance, the government, which is ultimately funded by taxpayers, guarantees the bank’s liabilities. Banking is a regulated industry, where the government has assumed a great deal of the risk. Bank and S&L liabilities are essentially guaranteed by the public’s money. The deal for that protection was adhering to certain regulations. Banks and S&Ls were limited in the kinds of loans they could make, the interest they could pay on their deposits, etc. The public was ultimately the rock that stood behind the bank, making that $100,000 of deposit insurance per account mean something.
If anything, the public accounting profession had a larger duty to perform independent audits on regulated corporations such as banks and S&Ls because a bank’s failure would ultimately risk taxpayers' money, not just rich shareholders' money. In a regulated industry, there is an extra level of auditing and accountability, in theory. Along with fancy Big Eight auditors were also governmental auditors (federal and state) looking over the bank's shoulders, making sure the public's interest was being looked after and banks were acting prudently. Ronald Reagan, in the interest of "getting the government off of the public's back," began gutting the government agencies that regulated industries such as banking.
The nature of Reagan's deregulation was insane (or diabolically sane) and ushered in the S&L scandal. Reagan "deregulated" the prudence side of the industry, letting S&Ls invest in almost anything they wanted, while letting them give out whatever interest rate to depositors they wished, while raising the deposit insurance from $40,000 to $100,000. Those acts dramatically shifted the risk from the S&Ls to the taxpayer. It let the S&Ls "go to Vegas" with speculative real estate deals, giving out whatever interest rate they wanted, and increased the size of the bag the taxpayer would hold if it all came crashing down. Organized crime rings avidly watched the deregulation bill make its way through Washington, rubbing their hands with anticipation. It was obvious where Reagan's "rescue package" was headed.
If my profession had been honest and the auditing profession structured to eliminate the conflict of interest of corporations being able to hire any auditor they wanted, the S&L crisis would have never happened. The alarm bells would have been going off back in 1983 throughout the industry, and something would have been done. The S&L industry was already doomed because of 1970s inflation related to OPEC’s oil price shocks. Increasing computer technology also eliminated much of the reason for S&Ls to exist. The price tag to responsibly sunset the industry would have been less than $10 billion in 1983. The number did not start growing large until about 1986.
What happened was avoidable. The Big Eight was not responsible for creating the S&L crisis, which was the result of global political-economic factors, corrupt politicians, greedy S&L executives and the landowners who made the big money from the scandal. Many books have dissected the scandal. Although my profession did not create the crisis, our prostitution for the audit fee, which was profession-wide, helped a $10 billion problem become a nearly $200 billion disaster.
When it came time to protect the public’s interest, which was the only reason our profession existed, we were busy kissing our clients' backsides. As it stands today, the public accounting profession is worthless. More than half of the Big Six's (now Big Four) revenues come from those audits. Back in 1984, the annual USA-based auditing revenues of the Big Eight were a few billion dollars. In 2004 they were about $10 billion. The inherent conflict of interest that existed in 1984 is still there. Minor reforms were enacted, but auditors cannot render independent audit opinions if the auditee pays their fee and can choose another auditor if they come up with the “wrong” answer. I have no confidence that when the next financial scandal looms, the Big Six will sound the early alarm (again, the Enron Scandal happened four years after this was originally drafted, and now it is the “Big Four”, and the current global financial scandal related to real estate hysteria will have the auditors accepting at least some responsibility). If they are financial cops, they are cops on the take.
In the movie Snow White, the Seven Dwarfs worked in a gem mine, and at day's end they happily marched home, singing their song. Dopey was the last one out. He shut the door, locked it, and left the key on a peg next to the door. The Big Eight was as valuable in protecting the public’s interest as that door was in protecting the gem mine. I did not completely figure it out until the price tag of many billions of dollars was announced immediately after George Bush was elected in 1988. Bush's son Neil was on the board of Silverado Savings in Denver, and helped ride it into the ground to the tune of $1 billion taxpayer dollars, and the S&L scandal was kept quiet until George Bush was elected.[5]
Money does not evaporate in such scandals. It goes into somebody's pockets. The S&L crisis was a defrauding of the public from beginning to end, and a great deal of criminal activity was engaged in, in addition to all those riverboat gamblers running S&Ls, lighting cigars with $100 bills and funding "see through" office buildings. There were S&L execs who went from one S&L to the next, looting it until it went under, then another S&L would hire them where the pattern was repeated, the CIA laundering drug money through them, and sheer Mafia gangsterism.[6]
The other primary activity the Big Four firms engage in is tax accounting. I had largely understood that game when I was in college. I was determined that I would never do professional tax accounting. That goal lasted a couple of months; that first tax season at the small CPA firm in Seattle saw me doing nothing but tax returns for my three-month stint there. The theory promoted for why professionals are needed so citizens can properly pay their taxes is that the tax code is a benign form of governance. Offering financial incentives for certain kinds of economic activities, and financial disincentives for others, is far less coercive than other methods of state power. I was that told in school, which is probably still the story today. I believed it, even if I did not believe in it. I now realize that I was sold another set of lies. For instance, the rationale capital gains deductions was presented as a way to encourage investment, risking capital for a higher return than mere bank deposit interest, or with bonds. I believed it, with my capitalistic indoctrination.
As I began waking up, the left’s literature allowed me to see that capital gains deduction in a new light. If somebody works at McDonald’s or drives a truck, the sweat of their brow is taxed at one rate. If somebody sits on their backside, "investing" their wealth in stocks, the money rolling in as passive income is taxed at a lesser rate. Neat scam. When I completed tax returns professionally, I performed tax research, and I regularly encountered tax laws so obscure that I wondered if they applied to even ten people. It became obvious that rich people write the tax laws. Legislators promoting appropriate economic activity did not author those obscure deduction laws. They were written at the behest of rich people (and large corporations), using their power to lobby congress with their wealth, giving them tremendous tax breaks.
How did I ever believe that baloney? Those obscure deductions eliminate a progressive tax system’s features. Corporate income taxes have steadily declined during the past few generations. The public accounting profession is a parasite. Its professionals spend years being trained in tax law so the rich can avoid taxes. During those Reagan-Bush years, regressive features were increasingly added to the tax system. For instance, they kept raising the Social Security rate, which is a tax that begins at the first dollar people earn. The rationalization is that it is paying for working people’s retirement. The reality is that increased flows into government coffers for raising Social Security rates are appropriated to cover the federal deficit (and George Bush the Second tried to privatize Social Security, essentially turning it over the Wall Street; so far, the public has resisted that move). The net effect was another transfer of money from the poor to the rich. The tax cuts the Reagan-Bush administration rammed through, while simultaneously raising a regressive tax such as Social Security, had transferred money from the poor to the rich. Those kinds of mechanisms have made wealth in the United States so concentrated. In 1997, the richest one-percent of Americans had 39.1% of the wealth, a share that had doubled since the 1970s.[7]
On a global scale, the wealth concentration is far worse, although it is hard to assign much responsibility to CPA firms. Earth’s richest four hundred people have about the net worth of the poorest three billion, for a wealth ratio of nearly ten-million-to-one. That is one effect of global capitalism. It has been happening since the West conquered the world. The global disparity in wealth has never been greater, and there is no sign it will get any better. The rich are getting richer as never before, and people are starving to death across the planet while Americans are the history’s fattest people.
The current system has been carefully constructed and is how the rich keep getting richer. On the federal level, the USA’s tax breaks and subsidies given to the rich are more than three times larger than transfers made to the poor. Fixed wages with unlimited profit potential (supposedly because capitalists take the "risk") is another mechanism. In the end, brute force helps the rich get richer, as any nation that tries opting out of the global capitalist system is bombed, invaded or otherwise bludgeoned, such as Vietnam, Chile, Cuba, Nicaragua, etc., etc. Corporate propaganda is part of the system; they own the media. The manipulation of the international banking system is another part of it. The phenomenon is multi-faceted.
Hitting Rock Bottom and Meeting Dennis Lee
For audits and tax preparation, CPA firms provide about zero public benefit, but take in about $20 billion per year in the USA. If our government were honest, the Securities and Exchange Commission would have nationalized the audit field long ago, and in the wake of the newest scandal, that option may be seriously considered. CPA firms have their hooks quite deeply into the SEC. It is known in economics jargon as "capturing the regulator." The government becomes corrupted by the very industries it regulates, and no longer looks after the public interest. I finally realized that my profession was worthless.
The sixty and seventy hour weeks during the busy season took their toll. I began suffering from stress symptoms. There were many factors, but sixty-hour weeks, changing my diet, attending endless phony social functions and having a hard time believing in what I was doing had a synergistic effect.
In early 1986, I wanted out of public accounting and sought a job in Los Angeles in "industry." One day in February of 1986, I hit rock bottom. I was shaking from stress, with eyes that looked like a raccoon's, dreading the next day. For the second and so far last time in my life, I went to bed while sending out a desperate plea to the cosmos. I had done my best, and felt backed into a corner with no way out. I even considered taking a clerical position, as long as it was close to home. What happened the next morning was not as dramatic as when the voice suggested that I study business, but during my first waking hour the voice whispering, "Well, what do you have to lose? You can starve in Seattle as easily as you can starve here, and you would like it there better." It was like a brilliant day dawning after a long, black night. I was almost delirious with excitement.
My manager on that S&L audit was helping me leave the company on my own terms. He said I could stay at home and look for work as long as I needed to. I called him up that morning, which was a Tuesday, and told him that I was moving to Seattle. I arrived in Seattle the next Monday and moved in with my grandparents. I spent a day getting my résumé updated, and then began looking for work. On Thursday, I had a meeting with an executive search firm. The recruiter told me that within a month I would easily find something desirable.
I went home that afternoon, ready for the long haul of finding work. I was in my paradise, hiking in the Cascade Mountains every week. That voice was right: I would be far happier starving in Seattle than in Los Angeles. The next morning I was lying in bed at about 9:00 AM, still asleep. The phone rang and I heard my grandmother's slow footsteps as she came to wake me. It was the recruiter I had spoken to the previous afternoon. He asked me if I could be ready for an interview that afternoon with a "solar company." It felt as if a lightning bolt hit me. It turned out to be the company owned by Dennis Lee.
I bowled over the controller who interviewed me. There were no other contenders for the job after my interview. A week later, Dennis and his wife interviewed me, and I was hired on the spot to begin work the next day.
When I met him, Dennis was marketing a heat pump. A serendipitous cowboy invented a "solar heat pump" in 1974 during the first energy crisis. Standard heat pumps today get what is known as a Coefficient of Performance (COP) of between two and three. In 1986, they averaged about a two. That meant that for every unit of electricity used to run a heat pump, two units of heat would be delivered into a home. The heat pump Dennis sold achieved a COP as high as twelve, and had done as high as a COP of five in Minnesota in January. It was two-to-three times as efficient as standard heat pumps. Dennis had been selling them on the East Coast for years, where customers would switch from oil or gas heating to his heat pump, and they would save seventy percent in operating costs versus heating with fossil fuels. It is still the best heating system the world market has ever seen.
Dennis’s marketing plan was sheer genius. For $4,000 dollars, he could fund the cost of marketing, manufacturing and installing his heat pump. He sold the heat pump for $10,000, the customer made a $4,000 down payment that the federal government refunded to the customer, and the $6,000 dollar balance would be paid over several years, based on proven savings. The customers risked none of their own money. Virtually everybody who ever heard of the deal went for it. What did they have to lose? For years, Dennis could not get any financiers to back his plan. Financiers, rich men and entrepreneurs got involved, but few ever saw the genius of Dennis’s plan. Their attitude was almost universally, "This is a great piece of equipment, and the price is $10,000 cash." They never realized that a customer would not part with $10,000 for a piece of equipment they were not sure worked. Dennis removed the customer's risk, but the money would not be completely collected for several years. Businessmen rarely think that far ahead, not when they smell the quick kill. When Dennis had his companies stolen time after time, the people who stole them thought the gold was in the system, and promptly discarded Dennis’s "crazy" marketing plans. They all promptly went out of business.
The Discover Card is a watered down version of a card Dennis invented years before he got into the energy business. As a marketer and entrepreneur, Dennis is an Einstein. I saw his genius immediately. Because of my first mentor, I became a student of genius, and knew what it looked like. Genius is simple, and turns ideas upside down or inside out, viewing problems without the presumptions that blind most people. Dennis had that knack.
Soon before the Mafia and his business associates stole his company for the last time on the East Coast, that time even stealing his personal possessions, leaving him and his family with only the clothes on their backs, Dennis nearly had a household name corporation put up $1 billion to carpet America with his heat pumps. The chairman of the board saw Dennis’s genius. Finally, Dennis stood in front of somebody who understood. Just as they were closing the deal, Dennis’s greedy business associates collapsed his company while stealing hundreds of thousand dollars from him. Soon after that, the Mafia stole what was left, and Dennis again started from scratch.
After a several month relationship with a rich business associate in Yakima who also did not understand, one day Dennis had had enough. Mr. Rich was telling people that he did not need Dennis anymore. Dennis bid Mr. Rich goodbye, packed his family into a beat-up station wagon, and drove over the mountains to Seattle with twenty dollars in his wallet and no place to sleep. That was in October of 1984, and Dennis sold 1,000 systems in a few months, and tried carpeting Puget Sound with them.
Dennis figured the job would only get done by doing it himself. His Seattle strategy was selling thousands of systems before he had financing, and maybe tens of millions of dollars of sales would finally attract a financier's attention. In the meantime, he was trying to interest the electric companies. Dennis thought he would be their hero, bringing the energy conservation that their ads said they desperately needed. They rebuffed him at every opportunity. He was surprised, but did not let that stop him, and sold systems as fast as he could. No system installed after December 31, 1985 would qualify for the Renewable Energy Tax Credit.
Although Dennis did not discover who was behind the vendetta for a long time, the electric companies wiped out his company, and a corporate hit man was responsible for the death of one of Dennis’s employees.
The most complete rendition of Dennis’s Seattle experiences is in My Quest, written from his jail cell in 1988-1989.[8] By the end of 1985, Dennis’s company had endured media smears, a fraudulent consumer protection lawsuit filed by the Attorney General's office, numerous break-ins and sabotages of their facility, bomb threats, theft of their phone equipment, attempted theft of all their records, surprise visits by the fire department and OSHA, a threatened investigation by the IRS, pressure being put on his financier, his suppliers, his customers, and his employees by various parties, such as the corporate hit man, the Attorney General's office and the courts. A fraudulent bankruptcy suit filed by the hit man and a few gullible employees capped off the circus. The Attorney General's office was involved with the hit man. They possessed documents he stole from the company, which they produced when Dennis threatened them with an FBI probe.[9] The media splashed the company in the newspaper and evening news, which scared away customers and employees, and shook up others, such as the financier. The electric companies were mobilizing their forces to wipe out the threat of a superior technology.
When I joined the company in March of 1986, it was in its death throes. In June 1986, I witnessed the theft of Dennis’s company, and my boss, the controller, engineered it, while the employees cheered. The financier had his company stolen two weeks before Dennis’s in a move that the financier believed was part of a conspiracy.[10] I lost plenty of innocence back then. I received one paycheck before the company stopped making payroll. I worked three months for free until the company was stolen. I was reverberating from the lightning bolt that hit me in March. Dozens of employees were hanging around the office, seemingly loyal to the cause. For the first time, I felt surrounded by people who were committed to making the world a better place and saw Dennis’s vision. When I saw that their loyalty was to their paycheck, I had a valuable and sobering learning experience.
Dennis was essentially run out of Washington. A member Washington State’s version of the SEC attended the shareholders' meeting where Dennis’s company was stolen, where those "loyal" employees showed their true colors. The representative calmly watched it happen, subpoenaing Dennis immediately before the company was stolen, seemingly trying to find him at fault for having his company stolen.
After seeing the outrageous and criminal acts engaged in by the authorities and others, Dennis felt their next move would be for the police to "find" a barrel of heroin in his closet. He left the state in June, moving to Chicago and soon to Boston, trying to rebuild. Although all I had seen was bloody ruin, my spiritual training was useful. I could spot a great soul. I was sold on Dennis. Of Dennis’s hundreds of Seattle employees, only I followed him to Boston.[11] Months of working without pay reduced me to moving back in with my grandparents and working as a temporary employee to save a few hundred dollars so I had gas money to drive to Boston. After years of trying to live in Seattle, I was leaving it to chase a crazy dream. It was about the most difficult thing I ever did. In November of 1986, with tears in my eyes, leaving behind a girlfriend who soon ended the relationship, I drove to Boston.
I went to Boston with nothing more than Dennis’s promise that he had a floor I could sleep on. The day after I got there, Dennis and I met with a company that had developed a turbine that used a 200° F heat source. Dennis got the idea of marrying his heat pump to that turbine to make "free electricity." It was a naïve idea at first, and the Second Law of Thermodynamics said it could not be done. I became far more involved than I imagined. I raised money to get us going again, a couple months after I got there, and I brought in my first mentor to take a look. He thought we had a chance, and even gave his world’s best engine to Dennis, to try marrying with Dennis’s heat pump’s panels to try making free energy, which my mentor thought was possible.
In Boston, in early 1987, Michael Dukakis was beginning his run for the presidency, and one Massachusetts’s big political issues was the Seabrook nuclear power plant. Seabrook was in New Hampshire, right over the Massachusetts border. Dukakis opposed the reactor, and if Massachusetts did not approve Seabrook’s evacuation plan, he could prevent it from going online. We had unwittingly landed in the middle of a huge energy controversy.
I first became aware of "Astroturf" organizations in Boston. An Astroturf organization is bankrolled by corporate America or other powerful interests, but camouflaged to appear as a grass roots effort. The first Astroturf organization I encountered (at least that I knew was one) was called the Coalition for Reliable Energy. While we presented our first "Greatest Energy Shows on Earth," the Coalition for Reliable Energy began a media blitz in Boston. The Coalition presented itself as an amalgamation of grandmothers and concerned citizens, making sure that New England had reliable energy and that all energy sources were considered. At the end of their first TV ad, a grandmotherly figure mumbled, "and nuclear energy options." That happened in January and February of 1987.
In a rare instance of mainstream investigative journalism, just as the Coalition's ad blitz was firing up, the Boston Globe revealed that 95% of the Coalition's funding came from the Seabrook Association, which consisted of the electric companies that invested in the Seabrook nuclear power plant. The Astroturf organization was unmasked.
Probably, not many people took their ads seriously after that revelation, but the ad blitz kept coming all spring. By the time we left Boston in June 1987, the ads had become brazen. They featured a thirty-something professional man telling the viewer, "You will have to pay for the Seabrook nuclear power plant whether you use it not, so why not use it?" It may be the most flagrant exercise of corporate propaganda that I have ever seen.
The Boston Globe continually ran front-page coverage of the Seabrook protests. Demonstrators chained themselves to the reactor's front gates almost daily. At that time, we were holding "free energy" shows, telling our audience that the best way to eliminate nuclear energy was making it obsolete. We met with a local protestor group and presented a plan for the electric companies to pursue free energy technology and end the nuclear insanity. Later, one of the group's high-ranking members told Dennis that their real motivation was not opposing nuclear energy, per se. The person funding them owned land that could be sold at a high price for a hydroelectric project. The protestors were proposing a hydroelectric solution, and their sponsor would get rich in the process. It appeared to be another Astroturf organization, although most of its members probably did not realize it.
At a show held a quarter mile from Seabrook's front gates, Dennis announced his intention to buy the reactor. He proposed to use the containment vessel as a heat storage facility, using free energy machines to supply the electricity. The mouse roared. Before the electric companies in Washington wiped out his company, Dennis’s stock in his company was worth $48 million. He barely escaped the state with the clothes on his back.
Dennis made a multibillion-dollar offer to buy the nuclear reactor and never put nuclear fuel in it. At the show, attended by about two hundred people, Dennis announced his offer to the Seabrook Association. The next day, he mailed his proposal. The Seabrook Association chairman of the board called our hole-in-the-wall office within minutes of receiving the package. He said he could immediately come to our office to discuss our proposal. That was a much different reception than Dennis received in Seattle.
Publicly, the Washington electric companies said they knew little about Dennis except that he was crooked and his technology was a scam. Soon after we arrived in Boston, a banker we encountered called the BPA to check out Dennis’s story. He called the BPA switchboard, asking if anybody could tell him about Dennis Lee. The next day he received a call from the BPA's conservation department. The banker said that the BPA man was extremely cautious, but admitted that, "For three months, all our entire department thought about was Dennis Lee." That was the same organization that hired the hit man, the same organization that publicly said "Dennis who?"
The Seabrook chairman invited Dennis to his office to discuss the proposal. The next week Dennis and his engineer (Mr. Engineer) were given the red carpet treatment at the Seabrook Association's palatial offices. The chairman and his pals discussed working with Dennis and his free energy ideas, thinking they might work. Dennis said it was almost amusing to watch them in action. They acted as if Dennis was the prodigal son. Dennis could see their masks slip at times, and it was evident that they were playacting.
Later, when Dennis composed a press release of his offer for the chairman's approval, the chairman began backpedaling and it became obvious that placating him was their goal all along. In Boston and California, we had friends on the inside, high in electric company hierarchies, who told us things. We heard that New England's electric companies convened secretly to decide what response to give to a wild man selling free electricity machines. Instead of the snuff job Dennis got in Seattle for merely selling a heat pump, at the secret meetings the consensus was they might have to cooperate with us.
As far as I know, the Boston Globe has never mentioned Dennis. To add a weird touch to those days, electric company representatives attended our Greatest Energy Shows, something they admitted when Dennis met with them. Right after one show, in the Boston Globe's weekly science section was an interview with a scientist who thought we could mine moon dust, extracting an isotope of helium from it, thereby solving our energy problems.[12] It was as though they knew exactly what they were doing and rubbed our faces in it. They ran front-page news of protests at Seabrook, while ignoring our show at the Seabrook gates. While we received the red carpet treatment from Seabrook’s chairman, and while New England's electric companies held secret meetings about us, the Boston Globe ran an article about mining the moon to solve our energy problems.
I lost more naïveté in Boston by witnessing a media blackout on us, seeing Orwellian ads from the Astroturf Coalition for Reliable Energy, reading moon dust articles and other oddities. The electric gangsters in Washington had not forgotten about Dennis. The Attorney General's hatchet lady, who repeatedly lied and bloodied her hands while trying to destroy Dennis’s company, quit her job soon after her final confrontation with him. She came to his office one day on a document-hunting expedition, but Dennis had her meet his employees, who grilled her for two hours about her underhanded actions. As fate would have it, Dennis found himself sitting next to her on an airplane flight years later. He asked her how she slept at night, and she gave Eichmann’s defense, that she was only following orders. Then she said, "But you will notice that I do not work for them anymore." Her hands got too bloody, her conscience finally woke up, and she quit the Attorney General's office.[13]
The Attorney General's office had a pinch hitter that sicced the authorities on Dennis everywhere he went after they ran him out of Washington. Ms. Pinch Hitter contacted the authorities immediately after Dennis arrived in Boston, and warned a Middlesex County District Attorney Investigator that the criminal of the century was in his backyard. The investigator swaggered into Dennis’s office a few days later, telling Dennis he looked forward to throwing him into jail, and made other officious threats. In Ventura, a telling document surfaced. That Middlesex investigator wrote to the sheriff's deputy who finally threw Dennis in jail on fabricated charges. The investigator wrote:
"Mr. Lee was attempting to duplicate his Washington operation in our state. We were attempting to proceed criminally against Mr. Lee but, without clear cut violations of our law, could only proceed in the manner in which we did. I don't believe our AG completed their investigation before Mr. Lee left our state."[14]
In other words, the investigator tried jailing Dennis based on Ms. Pinch Hitter’s word, but failed to find a law that Dennis broke. Given enough time, they might have found something, but we left the state before they could attack. They could not find a violation in California either, but that did not prevent them from inventing something. The Massachusetts Secretary of State's office was sharpening its axe as we were leaving Boston, trying to snare us in a securities law violation. They began a fishing expedition just before we left. The red carpet would turn redder with our blood if we stayed in Boston much longer.
In December 1996, I sent a Christmas card to the man who inspired me to become an accountant. Mr. Professor was the best teacher I ever had. We kept in touch, and I told him what his crazy former student was doing in Boston. Over the years, Dennis’s organizations have interfaced with many tens of thousands of people. Dennis has had a great deal of public exposure, in newspapers, on TV, on the Internet and on hundreds of radio talk shows. Millions of Americans have heard of Dennis. Mr. Professor's response was the rare time that somebody became excited about our project because of its potential benefit to humanity. Talk is cheap. Before it was over, Mr. Professor showed what he was made of. He displayed a level of integrity I have only seen in a few people.
Mr. Professor wanted to help fund the venture. I had recruited technical talent in California, and Mr. Professor was putting up more money. We moved to Ventura (where I was raised) in the summer of 1987. I would not have believed it at the time, but our experiences before Ventura were the easy days. In the fall of 1987, my mentor came forward with his hydraulic heat engine, and we started flying high. We were soon approaching gross revenues of a million dollars per month, selling informational kits on how to make, sell and install the heat pump.
On New Year's Day of 1988, we became involved with Victor Fischer, who had also invented a hydraulic heat engine and built some prototypes in Australia, which coming closer to the Carnot ideal than any engine ever developed. On January 12, 1988, Dennis publicly announced that he possessed the technology that could make free energy a possibility. In the crowd of four hundred was a Ventura County deputy sheriff (Mr. Deputy). He spoke to one of our administrative people a few weeks earlier. The Better Business Bureau was forwarding requests regarding our company us to Mr. Deputy, and our employee called, asking what was happening. Our employee used to be a sheriff's deputy himself, and knew that if our company was doing something illegal, the investigator was obligated to tell us when we asked him. Mr. Deputy replied that all was fine and that he would stop investigating us.[15]
Mr. Deputy was in the audience on January 12th, and the next day he was readying a search warrant for a raid on our facility. On January 14th at about 10:00 AM, I stood in our company's parking lot and watched ten cars speed into our driveway in a cloud of dust. Mr. Deputy leapt from the lead car and asked me if the building behind me was ours. The raid was on. Not only was Mr. Deputy guilty of entrapment, telling us three weeks earlier that we were not breaking any laws, but the raid was the first time that I experienced criminal acts engaged in by law enforcement personnel.
As we discovered later, the raid had a few purposes. The first was the felony act: the raid was an espionage exercise. Thirteen armed deputies raided our facility, rampaging through our building and herding everybody into our conference room. We were photographed and were required to produce identification before we could leave the building. Then the deputies kicked everybody out of our building and occupied it.
Our technical material was in that building. Our chief researcher's (Mr. Researcher) office was located next to our machine shop and research area. In his office were technical documents regarding the free energy prototypes we were developing (including Fischer's, and technical material on inventions that other inventors had sent us), and Mr. Researcher's personal papers. The research facility had mirrored windows, and people could not see into the building during daylight. After being ejected from the building, Mr. Researcher and the machinist went behind the building next to the machine shop. While standing there, they suddenly saw into the building because it was momentarily brighter inside the building than outside. The brightness was due to the repeated flash of a camera. The door to Mr. Researcher's office was open to the machine shop and, with each flash, the building’s interior was brilliantly illuminated. The sheriff's deputies were in Mr. Researcher's office, rolling out blueprints on his desk and photographing them.
Mr. Researcher eventually testified in court to witnessing those activities, as evidenced in the below document.
Click on image to enlarge
About an hour later, hours before their official search began, they were seen removing boxes from the building, loading them into a car and driving off. In those boxes were all the technical papers in Mr. Researcher's office. After they stole the technical data, they suddenly became cooperative and eventually allowed me to accompany them on their official search, while they sought evidence that their warrant authorized them to seize. In their official search, they pointedly ignored Mr. Researcher's office. It was the last place they officially searched, and the receipt they left stated they removed only one piece of paper from his office: a parts list for the heat pump. Below is a copy of the receipt they left in Mr. Researcher’s office.
Click on image to enlarge
The raid lasted from 10:00 AM to after midnight. When Mr. Researcher returned his office at 6:00 AM the next morning, the wreckage in his office told a different story. His office had been cleaned out. They took every scrap of important paper they could find. The blueprints were too big to sneak out in the boxes, so they photographed them. Everything else of importance was taken, and there sat the receipt, saying they took only one piece of paper. That kind of outright, naked crime, committed by police officers, was not only shocking, but also for the first time in my life I seriously harbored violent thoughts. Mr. Researcher was ashen-faced for weeks; he appeared on the verge of collapse. He quit the company a few weeks after the raid, not able to handle how he had been raped. That was only the raid's first goal.[16] I was later told that such behavior by the Ventura County sheriff’s deputies was not that unusual.[17]
The second goal was putting us out of business by seizing all our records. I was the controller, and my office was stripped to the walls. During the raid, as I escorted Mr. Deputy around our offices, I told him they could have whatever records they needed. What they did to Mr. Researcher's office was not known until the next morning. Mr. Deputy said I could have copies of anything I needed to continue running the business. He also tried convincing me that Dennis was a crook because of what happened in Seattle. When I told him that I was with Dennis in Seattle and knew what happened, he stopped using that approach with me. I was relieved of my duties after several hours of escorting the deputies through our buildings. The next morning, I discovered that they had taken every scrap of documentation we had, and Mr. Deputy reneged on his promise of providing copies of our records. When he refused to honor his word, he also told me we were lucky they did not also take our computers. We did not even know who all our customers were after receiving their lobotomy. That alone nearly put us out of business.
Their third goal was the legal one: gathering evidence for our "crime." During the raid, I asked Mr. Deputy what we did to warrant thirteen armed deputies storming our building. He said we might have violated an obscure franchise law. Not one California lawyer in a hundred has ever heard of California Civil Code 1812.200, the Seller Assisted Marketing Plan Act (SAMP). It was known as a "worm farm" law, due to the short-lived worm farm businesses in the 1970s, where people put their life's savings into questionable business opportunities. The law was designed to regulate the sales of business opportunities. The law required a business to register with the California Secretary of State's office. To comply, a business filed a one-page form with the Secretary of State's office. The form provided cursory information about the business, and the filing was accompanied by a fifty dollar filing fee.
There had been one prosecution in California's history under that law. It is what Dennis called a "Red Tie on a Tuesday" law. It was a law that nobody knew of, but through corrupt law enforcement it became a crime to do what everybody else did, such as wearing a red tie on a Tuesday. Of the million men who wore a red tie on Tuesday, you were the only one prosecuted. Before Dennis’s case was over, he got an affidavit from the lawyer who wrote the SAMP law. In a conversation with our attorney, the lawyer estimated that up to 100,000 California businesses could qualify for the law’s filing requirements. According to the lawyer’s affidavit, only 250 companies had ever made the filing, for a compliance rate of 0.25%.[18] Dennis was the second person ever prosecuted under those laws; the other was for a man selling Little League franchises, and his conviction was overturned on appeal. Dennis is likely the only person who will ever do prison time for "violating" that civil law.
We sued for civil rights violations and the theft of our technical material in the raid. Thousands of people called the sheriff's department to protest. The next several months were nightmarish for me. Working with no records was a small fraction of what I experienced. The stress symptoms I suffered in Los Angeles returned soon after I raised the money in Boston, and friends began attacking me. I came to terms with possibly being murdered for my efforts, and I worked seventy-hour weeks. After the raid, my stress symptoms blossomed. I had to work sixteen-hour days just to survive.
What happened in Ventura caused a number of close family members to refuse to speak to me for several years. Mr. Professor, Dennis, his wife and I felt nearly alone in a world of insanity and darkness. By May 1988, I was becoming useless, just sitting at my desk, quivering. I asked Dennis if I could take the summer off, not knowing if my body, mind and emotions could withstand such a situation again. Dennis understood what I was going through. I was involved with my future wife by that time, and those events put our relationship through severe stresses.
In May 1988, the same month that I left the company, Dennis received an offer. It was not the first offer he received, and this tale will digress a little, with the kinds of offers that Dennis and others like him receive.
Make Them an Offer They Can't Refuse
What the Attorney General's office did in Washington was a conspiracy, but precisely how much cooperation was happening between the electric companies, the Attorney General's office, the media, the federal bankruptcy courts and others is not easy to know. The local police refused to arrest or even investigate the BPA hit man, even after his actions caused one woman's death, when his accomplices in our company confessed to espionage on his behalf, and when documents he stole from Dennis’s company were later found in the Attorney General's investigative files. The Attorney General's office hurriedly returned them when Dennis threatened them with an FBI probe. When bullets fly at you from every direction, it is legitimate to wonder if somebody is orchestrating the salvos.
When the Middlesex County investigator admitted that he was investigating Dennis because the Washington Attorney General's office contacted him, it could have been “innocent.” It could have just been a day at the office “fighting crime.” The phenomenon of local economic interests initiating “investigation” of potential competitors is probably a global phenomenon, with little overt cooperation between them needed.
The Attorney General's office contacting Middlesex County and siccing them on Dennis was not necessarily conspiratorial on the part of Middlesex County. Low intelligence combined with vindictiveness and zero integrity is not unusual in law enforcement. Various interests in Washington, however, sent their soldiers marching after Dennis, and it had nothing whatsoever to do with protecting the public. The BPA hit man knew exactly what he was doing and why. Whoever hired him also knew exactly what they were doing. However far that might venture into a worldwide conspiracy is debatable, but the hit man changing costumes and becoming a “noted Tesla researcher” after he helped wipe out Dennis’s efforts in Washington made it seem part of a more comprehensive effort. The barrage of attacks by the Washington Attorney General's office after Dennis left the state also has the whiff of a broader conspiracy.
It is possible, however, that it was merely a mean-spirited vendetta by the Attorney General (AG) to inflict vengeance on somebody who stood up to his attacks. Dennis made the AG suffer. When the AG's office attacked the company with their phony lawsuit and media blitz, Dennis responded. He bought a full-page ad in The Seattle Times that ran on October 18, 1985.[19] It enraged the public. The AG's office was inundated with public protest. Dennis later heard what AG was livid while reading Dennis’s full-page ad.
Years later, Dennis heard that he became famous by standing up to the AG. It was one of the two worst publicity black eyes the AG ever endured while trying to crush somebody. The other black eye came from wiping out an activist who tried ending Seattle’s homeless problem with affordable housing solutions. The activist fought back, and his campaign aired the AG’s dirty laundry while he was running for governor in 1992, and may have been a key reason he barely lost. Ms. Pinch Hitter was a prominent member of the AG's staff. When the AG ran for governor, she quit and joined his campaign. Perhaps siccing the authorities on Dennis everywhere he went was just vengeance from the AG, and his close relationship to the Ms. Pinch Hitter[20] gives evidence of the AG's personal interest in making Dennis’s life miserable.
I have seen no evidence that the Massachusetts Secretary of State's investigation into our money-raising efforts had anything to do with Washington. I have heard nothing about why they did it, but our efforts were not likely to have drawn the “innocent” attention of Massachusetts’s law enforcement officials; almost all of our business associates were from New Hampshire. I suspect that the electric interests in New England instigated it.
Somebody also instigated what happened in California. Mr. Deputy's investigative report regarding his involvement with investigating Dennis is amazing reading. According to Mr. Deputy, he was minding his own business when a man contacted him who attended Dennis’s Saturday show at our facility. According to Mr. Deputy, the man "said that he was bedazzled by the caffeine in the coffee, the sugar in the donuts and the speaker's presentation and really wasn't sure what you get for the money."[21] The man did not buy anything. He was not a complaining victim. That supposedly got Mr. Deputy hot on his career-making case. We were drugging our marks with coffee and donuts, and Dennis closed the deal on our bedazzled victims.
Mr. Professor knew somebody high-ranking at the local electric company. During the summer of 1987, the electric company knew very well about us. Mr. Professor asked his friend what they planned to do about us, and the man replied that the electric company had not yet decided. It appears that Mr. Deputy's "investigation" in the fall of 1987 was related to their decision. We later heard from other sources that the chairman of the board ordered the hit. Maybe it was not the chairman. I will never believe that when the deputies ransacked Mr. Researcher's office during the raid, stealing technical material, that they did it for their own edification, to peruse at their leisure while watching Sunday football games on TV.
How deeply that conspiracy went, I cannot say. Not all deputies involved with the raid knew what really happened; one was a former student of Mr. Professor’s, and had no idea what really happened that day. As Smedley Butler said, soldiers blindly following orders can serve evil as easily as "good." I doubt the thieving deputies knew who they stole the technical material for, or even cared. When studying covert actions by folks at the CIA, NSA etc., it becomes obvious that few see the big picture, except those at the top. Those in the chain of command work on a need-to-know basis, with strict compartmentalization, secrecy and the rest. Later events later made the picture clearer.
Conspiracies do not explain everything that happens, or even all that much of the suppression dynamic. That is too simple-minded, but I believe that the attacks on Dennis were not all isolated and unrelated instances of local energy companies protecting their revenue base. There is substantial evidence that supports arguments for an energy industry "immune system." The dynamics I have seen in energy I have also seen in medicine, particularly in the cancer racket. The more wealth and power vested in any particular industry or profession, the more ruthlessly it protects itself. Every industry and profession has an infrastructure designed to protect itself from competition. How far they take their defensive strategies, and how far they can take them, is dependent on how powerful that industry or profession is. The more concentrated that wealth and power, the more likely conscious and ruthless activities to keep the competition at bay will be seen.
The energy industry is arguably the world’s most powerful. The military may seem more powerful, but the military is not running the show, but is the muscle used to keep the rackets flowing smoothly, and it is one of the biggest rackets itself. As Butler said, those order-following soldiers have little idea whose interests they really serve, which is part of the racket's design.
The geopolitical devastation the energy industry has inflicted on the planet is not pretty. In Nigeria, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia and other places, the ruling elite has a sinister relationship with the oil companies, and their domestic populations are repressed. Those situations make for unpleasant realizations regarding the connection between the oil those nations have, their repressive governments, the Western oil companies and the governments of Western nations. The oil-control genocide that American is inflicting on Iraq today is merely one more example of how the world really works.
If Americans think I am unfairly picking on America, my motivation is that Americans can do something about America's behavior, and they are my target audience. Pointing out the flaws in of Soviet-style communism system, and there were many, can be a rewarding exercise, but that does not excuse our murderous international behavior. We are most responsible for the predictable consequences of our actions, not the actions of somebody in China.
Here is an example of blood on the West's hands that is not all America’s. In 1995, Nigeria's government executed Nobel Prize literature nominee Ken Saro-Wiwa and several others. Their ostensible crime was their activism for human rights and resisting the corporate practices of Shell-BP, whose activities have long are devastated the Nigerian environment, particularly the Ogoni tribe’s land, and Saro-Wiwa was an Ogoni. In Nigeria’s case, Great Britain has been the chief culprit, arming the dictatorship in neocolonial-style while the oil flows unabated from the region. Saro-Wiwa's execution, along with several other activists, was one of the greatest human rights outrages of the 1990s. The United States, Britain and other nations, such as South Africa, stood by and watched it happen. The tragedy continues. Nigerian literature Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka lived in exile with a price on his head for years. Genocide and devastation is OK as long as the oil keeps flowing. The American-sponsored genocide in East Timor was another instance of securing more cheap oil for the West.
Oil is not the only big prize, whereby the masses suffer greatly to keep the cheap energy coming. Coal is another, and Native Americans have suffered greatly because uranium was discovered on their "worthless" reservation lands in the 20th century.[22]
With that teenage dream of revolutionizing the energy industry, I also realized that our energy production methods devastate the environment, are not sustainable, and harm many people. I also saw that our dependence on fossil fuels, particularly those Middle East "reserves," might lead to World War III. That was another monkey on my back. Free energy might just help save humanity from self-destruction. Brian O'Leary feels the same way, as do many others.[23] The U.S.-caused holocaust in Iraq and today’s fraudulent “War on Terror” is something that I have tried preventing for my entire adult life. For all the immense value of uranium, wood, hydroelectric energy and coal, oil has been the greatest prize for the past century, and the industry wields tremendous international power.
In Boston, I began new levels of education. Just before Dennis made his public offer to buy out Seabrook, one of our merchants arranged an interview on a New Hampshire radio station, to be taped for airing later. As Dennis and I arrived, the receptionist told us to wait a minute, as our interviewer was "talking to a Senator." Then the man came out, welcomed us, and we entered his studio. It was a typical interview, with questions such as "Mr. Lee, you say you have a heat pump that gets high efficiencies, and you say you can generate free electricity with it. Wow!" It was a "gee whiz" interview. After he finished taping the interview, he turned off his professional reel-to-reel tape recorder. He was affable, with his leading man voice. He then said, "Off the record, Mr. Lee, what is really happening? Do you think you can really make free electricity? Are you trying to challenge them? Let's have a friendly chat. I want to know more." As he was saying that, he turned on a small desktop tape recorder. For the next half-hour, Dennis talked about how he was not threatening the electric companies, but wanted to work with them to end pollution and bring renewable energy to the world.
After our chat, we walked to my car. As we pulled away, Dennis said, "Did you see him turn on that small tape recorder after taping the show? That was the real interview. That tape is going to the Big Boys. They will never air our original interview." I looked at Dennis in shock and disbelief. "What?!" I stammered. Immediately, I was trying to make sense of what he said. Dennis would later write that I looked at him as if he were crazy. Maybe it looked that way to him, but it was more like being told something shocking, not knowing what to make of it. As I sat there, driving the car in puzzlement, Dennis sighed and said, "This is going to be a long haul. Let me tell you some of what is happening."
Dennis told me what he thought was really happening. It was during those days that I faced the possibility of being murdered for pursuing free energy. I decided that if it came to that, it did. Nobody lives forever, and I could think of nothing more worthwhile to pursue. If the energy gangsters murdered me, well, it happened. It is one thing to face such a situation in one's mind. It is another reality entirely to face it in real life.
Dennis thought the informal interview was the real one, and that the local energy interests wanted to know what Dennis’s attitude really was. It was the next week, I believe, when Dennis received the call from the Seabrook chairman. Our radio interview never aired. The chairman almost certainly heard that "informal" interview. It appears that Dennis was right.
Brian O'Leary is an ex-Astronaut, ex-colleague of Carl Sagan, the first human slated to visit another planet (Mars), and a fellow free energy visionary. O'Leary's Miracle in the Void contains one of the best, most succinct summaries of free energy's suppression. Brian wrote of his encounter at a free energy symposium funded by a software entrepreneur who was worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Brian attended the symposium at the entrepreneur’s behest and subsidy, and heard the entrepreneur’s marketing gurus tell the gathering why he was not committing significant funding to developing free energy:
"He explained to us that the situation was similar to that of a river. For optimal profits we want to catch the river where and when it flows fastest. Until then it would be foolish to put up much money now. Why spend millions of dollars now, with uncertain results, if we could hold back those millions until such time is truly ready to enter the marketplace and can outcompete the others?"[24]
Brian wrote of his anger and awe. While humanity may be on the brink of self-annihilation, that rich man would wait as a vulture would, seizing the best opportunity to make a killing in free energy.
In those days in Boston, as Dennis first made his "free energy" noise, we received our first offer. A fairly non-descript group of businessmen came to our office. They offered ten million dollars for the rights to our technologies. I would have become an overnight millionaire, and Dennis far more so, but that was not our program. Our goal was bringing free energy to the world, not being bought out. We could not say for certain that their goal was buying us out and shelving our technology, but it smelled similar to the stories I heard when I was younger.
We did not accept their offer, but kept operating on a shoestring. At that time, we nearly became involved with a household name marketing organization. They performed some shoddy investigation of our technology, tested a broken system, and decided against becoming involved with us. We were becoming desperate for money, but Dennis was relieved that we did not get involved, because it would mean losing his freedom.
In Ventura, Dennis hit on a program that worked. We ran ads in newspapers, such as USA Today, modestly titled "Free Electricity!" and we sent out videotapes of our pitch, offering to sell educational materials to market, manufacture and install the heat pump, and announced that we were working toward free energy. People began mailing us checks for thousands of dollars. About all I had seen with Dennis was disaster until September of 1987, but Dennis said he had found the new rocket ship.
The program exploded. Money began pouring in from across the country. We were so buried in orders that we were more than a month behind in shipping them out. We went from a few volunteers to more than forty employees in about two months. I did not see Dennis’s glory days in Seattle, but I saw it in Ventura. It was like holding onto a rope tied to a rocket ship.
The raid gave us more credibility, not less, with the public. Many had some idea how the system worked, and being attacked gave us legitimacy. Our sales increased and, in May of 1988, Dennis received a second offer. That one was a little different. Dennis was invited to meet with bankers in Chicago. Dennis met a CIA man who represented "European" interests and he said that they would write Dennis a check. They would "put a '1' on it" and Dennis could put on the zeroes. It is one thing to hear the stories from people who approach you; it is another level of understanding when it happens to you.[25]
Dennis’s integrity had already been tested many times, although he never before received a "name your price and we will pay it" offer. Dennis made a counteroffer: he would to put the zeroes on the check, but the money would go right back into the European interests' pockets, and they would be forced to spend that money on bringing free energy to the world! The CIA man was stunned and sat there, speechless. After recovering from his shock, he regained his friendly demeanor but said he was not empowered to accept Dennis’s offer. He came to California a few weeks later to meet Dennis, but never again mentioned the offer. The next month, Dennis was arrested with a $1 million bail. Dennis thinks that his arrest was their response to his offer. I would have been a millionaire many, many times over if Dennis had taken that deal, but dealing with the devil never works out too well. I could not have lived with myself if we had taken that quiet money. That was the exact opposite of what we were about.
Such offers are never put on paper. I have now heard of many like it. Nobody goes to court to try enforcing those kinds of deals. Now that I have heard many stories similar to ours, from those with no reason to lie to us, I see the game. As Don Corleone did, they make you an offer you can't refuse. If you refuse their offer, they destroy you. Here are other stories told to us or myself, from people we believe.
A few weeks after we came to California in the summer of 1987, Dennis ran "Free Electricity!" ads in the Los Angeles Times. In those ads, he was looking for salesmen. One evening, Dennis and I were in Mr. Professor's office (we had not gotten going in California yet) and Dennis was calling the ad leads. As I worked alongside him, Dennis talked to a sales lead that told Dennis that he was the marketing director for a company that made cars that got 100 MPG (it could well have been the company that built my mentor’s engine and drove a prototype of it in a Rose Bowl parade). The caller said the company no longer existed because the founders were in prison. The government prosecuted them for fraud. It was the standard "protect the consumer" angle. The man said the prosecution's star witness claimed that he was an important engineer for their company, who was there for years. The engineer testified to the company's fraudulent practices. Nobody at the company had ever seen the man before. Forged payroll records were produced at the trial to "prove" the witness worked for the company. The man told Dennis, "You don't know what they'll do to you!" Dennis told the man "Admit it, you called me because you believe some people have the guts to do it. You want to see me succeed." Dennis was jailed less than a year later.
With the national exposure that Dennis receives from time to time, we became a magnet for others like us, and they came, telling familiar stories. Our experiences were far from unique. After the raid and before Dennis was arrested, numerous people approached us, telling their tales. Here are two more.
One man told us of living in a chiropractor's back office. His friend was a professor at a California State University and developed a chemical method to extract platinum from ore considered unmineable. The process promised to make platinum much more available, hence cheaper. Experiments yielded nearly unbelievable results. They became involved with some famous old New York money. They began using the process to mine in the California desert. They bought the mining equipment with the New York money. Suddenly, the bank seized their funds and the sheriff was beating their door down for violating a law that nobody had enforced since the nineteenth century. The two men fled in a panic. The teacher's truck was found abandoned in the desert, and he was never seen again. The other man slept in the back of a chiropractor's office for two years in order to stay alive. The New York money now owns the land where the mine was.
One man arrived at our office in a limousine. He told us that he once owned a windmill facility in the Southwest that actually worked, not an investment scam used to get federal tax breaks. He was selling electricity, competing against the electric companies. One evening, he was working late at his facility and received a phone call. The caller told him that if he did not immediately leave the premises and never return, his family would be dead by dawn. The caller made it clear that he was serious and could deliver on his threat. The man took out his calculator and did some figuring. His net worth was about $400 million, and he had invested $35 million in the windmill project, about nine percent of his net worth. It was not worth it. He packed up his briefcase and left the premises, never to return. At our business he said, "I wish you the best, but you do not know what you are up against."
Those people had no reason to make things up. They were relating their traumatic experiences to people who would listen, not ridicule, and perhaps heed their cautionary tales. I now know how they felt.
One technology decried as an "urban legend" by the "skeptics" is the high MPG carburetor. I had an engineer friend who was designing and building his own high MPG carburetor. The basic flaw with today's carburetion systems is that they introduce liquid into the combustion chamber, and therefore the gasoline cannot completely ignite. Leaving the exhaust pipe are the results of combustion and uncombusted fuel, now completely vaporized as it exits the exhaust pipe. If carburetors can be designed to inject vaporized gasoline, the combustion will be more complete, with more energy released. All high MPG carburetors work on that principle, and are called vapor injection carburetors. My friend was building a vapor injection carburetor and ordered a list of patents on them. The ones he saw marketed were poorly designed, and he thought he could do better. He got back quite a list. Auto companies and other large corporations owned practically every patent. My friend wisely abandoned his project.
One corporate coworker, a friend who was a professional at the parent company of one of my employers, was a U.S. Department of Justice investigator early in his career. He worked undercover and sometimes rotated into other duties. He was assigned one of the Justice Department's more mundane tasks: responding directly to public inquiries. The low-ranking people got that duty. The phone calls came into the Justice Department and were recorded. One day, he responded to a caller who said that an American automobile company had threatened his life. My friend called the man back, figuring it was one more paranoid tale, but he could not lightly dismiss alleged death threats. My friend called and said, "Sir, what evidence do you have that (the car company) is going to kill you? The man replied, "Because they told me so. Showed right up at my house and told me so." When my friend asked why, the man replied, "Because I invented a carburetor that gets more than one hundred miles per gallon."
As the conversation continued, my friend realized the story was difficult to dismiss, and decided to visit the inventor. He traveled to the inventor’s home, and was invited to the inventor’s shop to see the carburetor. The inventor said that the car company tried buying it from him. When that strategy failed, they threatened him. Then they tried both tactics at once, culminating with a man showing up with $500,000 in cash in a sack, telling the inventor to take it. The inventor was told that if he did not take it, he would be killed. My friend began taking the case more seriously, and asked what the inventor wanted the Justice Department to do, and he said, "I want you to protect me!"
My friend looked more deeply into the matter, and the inventor’s story checked out. Here was the Justice Department's response, as delivered by my friend,
"We cannot protect you forever, unless you move away and change your identity, which we can help you do, but if you try selling your carburetor again, they will find you. We suggest that you settle the matter with them."
The inventor settled with them, when given those options. He let them buy it out, and it was a better deal than the previous offer, probably because the Justice Department became involved. The deal was for a million dollars per year for fifty years, and payable to the inventor’s heirs in the event of his death. My friend told me that the oil companies funded it. My buddy was not a wild-eyed, paranoid lunatic. He was a corporate big shot who performed the investigation himself, somebody I worked with for five years. I imagine that man's carburetor was on the list of vapor injection carburetors that my engineer friend received. Another buddy who worked for General Motors told me a similar tale, as have others.
I once had an encounter with Tom Bearden, a leading free energy theorist. Richard Hoagland presented a conference in Seattle in September 1998 in which Bearden and Tom Van Flandern presented their theories and data. There were question and answer sessions. None of my many submitted questions were answered, but Bearden answered somebody else's question regarding the suppression of free energy. I respect Bearden's experiences. Bearden spent about twenty minutes answering the question, and when he finished the audience was stunned.
Bearden is aware of a global infrastructure that suppresses free energy research, development and marketing attempts. Bearden said it was not the oil companies, per se. The oil companies were in the business of finding oil, extracting it, refining it and selling it. They do not bother themselves with suppressing alternative energy, at least not the efforts Bearden described. Bearden said that some oil company owners, however, were behind the suppression of free energy. Bearden said they had developed the global infrastructure that wiped out free energy innovations.
Bearden may not see the entire picture (if anybody does); our experiences were related to the electric companies, not the oil companies, but Bearden's opinion is not easily dismissed. Bearden said that the small group of oil company owners (Rockefeller agents are nearly guaranteed to be involved) have built a sophisticated organization that keeps its ear to the ground, keeping tabs on free energy efforts and ensuring that they never succeed. Bearden said they were experts in "game theory,” and said that he might write a book about it someday.
Bearden said they build dossiers on free energy researchers and pioneers. They study each individual for weaknesses. Does a researcher have a weakness for attractive women? Does he smoke pot? What angle can they use on him? Can they direct an inventor toward his organization whose personality will clash with the others? Bearden said their game theory was a discipline of strategy, probability and outcome, whereby a free energy pioneer is similar to the king in a chess game, and maneuvering him into checkmate is the goal. Those people working for the oil company owners (it may extend to all energy companies) spend their careers defeating free energy threats. Only when the clandestine moves fail do they escalate the strategy. Death threats, prison terms and violence only happen when the game reaches higher levels.
Here is an appropriate place to insert a quote from Machiavelli:
"And one should bear in mind that there is nothing more difficult to execute, nor more dubious of success, nor more dangerous to administer than to introduce a new system of things: for he who introduces it has all those who profit from the old system as his enemies, and he has only lukewarm allies in all those who might profit from the new system. This lukewarmness partly stems from fear of their adversaries, who have the law on their side, and partly from the skepticism of men who do not truly believe in new things unless they have actually had personal experience of them."[26]
Bearden told of an event that he was involved with, to demonstrate how the secret teams operated. Bearden has worked with numerous companies over the years, trying to get free energy developed. Bearden has seen working free energy prototypes, but the game theory boys have been actively mischievous. One company Bearden worked with was looking for money. Somebody approached their company, presenting his credentials as a high-flying financial wizard (Mr. Wizard) that could obtain the money. Mr. Wizard really worked on a secret team and approached the Justice Department, telling them that he hired on with Bearden's company, but as he got in deeper he realized that Bearden and company were crooks, engaging in a big scam. Mr. Wizard told the Justice Department that he would help them nab Bearden and friends if he got immunity.
Mr. Wizard then developed a financing deal that involved offshore bank accounts, relatively anonymous organizations and other shadowy aspects. It seemed like a relatively straightforward deal to get legitimate money, but probably came from a money laundering operation for the drug lords or CIA. The money was not "clean," but unless Bearden and gang performed a thorough investigation, they would never know. Mr. Wizard put the deal together, but told the Justice Department that Bearden and friends were putting it together, and that he was the chump they hired to finalize it. The Justice Department was lured into the deal, rubbing their hands, ready to nab Bearden and his partners.
Mr. Wizard presented the deal to Bearden and friends, telling them that he found the money. They merely had to sign their names and the big money was theirs, making their noble free energy dream a reality. Bearden's funny bone quivered. It did not smell right. He told the company president that the deal smelled suspicious, and to not sign it. Given Bearden’s warning, the president decided not to. In the next room were U.S. marshals, handcuffs ready, waiting for Bearden and the president to sign the documents. If Bearden and the president had signed the deal, they would have gone to prison for twenty years or so. They could nearly hear the groans from Mr. Wizard and marshals in the next room when the president took Bearden’s advice and did not sign.
Bearden told that story as an example of their non-violent Machiavellian methods, and he then told what happened when such "benign" game theory tactics failed. In 2008, I realized that we were targeted by a similar operation in 1996. Only then would inventors and entrepreneurs receive anonymous phone calls, telling them to stop their efforts if they wanted their family to survive that night. Their homes and businesses might mysteriously burn down. Bearden told of the friendly buyout offer. The inventor would be approached, asking if a few million dollars would be enough to buy out his technology. If the inventor or entrepreneur proved recalcitrant, he might receive the offer he could not refuse: "If you don't take $10 million to buy you out, we will kill you and your family." Bearden's stories sounded very familiar. He said that $10 million was the going rate the last he knew, and knew an inventor who he thought was forced to "bite that bullet" fairly recently. They use big carrots and big sticks. How can they offer a carrot to a multi-hundred-millionaire building a windmill farm? They usually cannot, so they move straight to the stick. I have also heard nightmare tales of them carrying through on their threats, where entire families have been murdered, their houses set on fire and then bulldozed. Those extreme measures can permanently derail certain free energy threats, but are only undertaken sparingly as they attract too much attention, because a world unaware of their suppression efforts is their best protection. Their methods have worked effectively for at least the past sixty years.
For several reasons, I rarely use names when writing about these matters; the anonymous’s fear for their and their families’ wellbeing is the primary reason. Also, naming names can get me killed. I have seen many lives destroyed on my journey, and many still live in fear today, decades later. Several more people must die before I can name very many more names, but it is now “safe” to mention Sparky Sweet; his tale is famous and he died in 1995.[27] Sparky was Bearden’s friend and a successful research scientist whose work may be partly based on that of General Electric scientist Gabriel Kron. After retiring from General Electric, Sparky kept researching in his specialty of magnetism and eventually developed a prototype that generated a million times more energy than went into it. Even though some call him a “maverick,” he was anything but, and went to great lengths to interest the energy establishment in his work. A limitation that plagues most inventors and engineers is their political-economic naïveté. R. Buckminster Fuller wrote about that problem, and Sparky was naïve about what the energy interests’ reaction would be to mailing working prototypes to them. Their official response was silence. Instead of a tickertape parade for solving the world’s energy problems, he was hounded to a grim end. The Big Boys were interested in his work, all right, but their attention was limited to putting him under surveillance (including showing him pictures that they took of him through the walls of his home), sabotaging his efforts to bring his technology to the public and making death threats that eventually drove him into hiding and a lonely and possibly violent end.
Sparky’s fatal “heart attack” might have been natural, but the spooks who use technology where they can photograph people through the walls of their homes can also shoot them with a microwave weapon which can induce a heart attack. Another fellow free energy traveler may have experienced one of those spook-induced heart attacks while in his home, but he survived it and did not understand what probably happened until several years later. The spooks are experts at killing people and making it seem like an “accident” or “natural causes.”
One of Dennis’s technical advisors (Mr. Advisor) from the Ventura days was invited by the now-defunct International Tesla Society to visit Sparky in the late 1980s. Sparky lived in the Los Angeles area, not far from Ventura. When they met, Sparky was well aware of Dennis’s ordeal and voiced his sympathy. Sparky then showed Mr. Advisor his device. Mr. Advisor told me the awe he experienced while watching it operating as ice formed on it. Sparky then related his experiences while developing his device and offered to make Mr. Advisor his partner, because Sparky knew him by reputation. Mr. Advisor, having experienced the Ventura nightmare, had no desire to repeat the experience and had retired from the alternative energy scene. He declined Sparky’s offer. Sparky still wanted the benefit of Mr. Advisor's mind and lent him the book he wrote to describe his prototype's function and the theory behind it (some of which is on the Internet today). Mr. Advisor told me that the math was particularly elegant.
When I heard Steven Greer say in 2004 that the Big Boys told him that they paid off 10,000 people at an average of $10 million each over the past sixty years or so, it made perfect sense. Ten million dollars times ten thousand people is $100 billion in quiet money. I would not be surprised if the Big Boys spent another $100 billion on their global surveillance and suppression efforts. That is not a trivial sum, but is a pittance at the level they play at: keeping an entire planet enslaved to scarcity-based paradigms. Greer also knows billionaires, and when any have tried helping to a free energy effort, they have immediately received threats, the kind that that windmill entrepreneur did.
Long ago, a high-profile friend of mine received a demonstration from the spooks. He was transported, blindfolded, to an underground location where they demonstrated free energy, anti-gravity and other technologies, along with an explanation of why such technologies would remain underground. That friend proved his integrity to me many times - he has not abused me with a fanciful tale. Very few can tell such a story, however, and virtually nobody will tell it publicly. Those technologies my friend saw were probably at least partly developed by reverse-engineering “captured” extraterrestrial craft, the kind I have now seen with my own eyes. What my friend saw neatly aligns with what Steven Greer’s 400-plus UFO witnesses have to say, and others have been given shows like that.
Here is my final anecdote from the free energy milieu. A fellow traveler once told me about his early experiences in the free energy field. He had a mystical awakening while a college physics student, and used his new insight to create a working free energy prototype. Within hours of getting his prototype to work, he received a “men in black” experience where the spooks descended on his lab bench, confiscated his prototype and incarcerated him. He was dazed when released, wondering what had just happened. He eventually became indignant and planned to redevelop his prototype in secret. Years later, he rented a hole-the-wall lab under an assumed name and worked in the utmost secrecy. Immediately after he got his new prototype to work, the same “men in black” treatment happened again! He then stopped trying to make prototypes, and his free energy path has since taken a different direction. When I heard him say that, I imagined that the Big Boys must have a technology that can detect when anybody on earth taps into that energy field. In 2005, I heard from somebody whose opinion I respect on these matters, and he said that, indeed, the Big Boys have satellites in orbit that can tell when anybody taps into that field. Then they send their “men in black” after them to eliminate the threat of free energy. I have seen other weird evidence of the global control mechanism that the Big Boys have developed.
The technology the spooks possess is apparently about a hundred years ahead of what is on the market today. The American military has technology that is "only" about ten years ahead of what is on today's market. The spooks apparently have technology that can create holographic illusions that the people think are real events, not virtual reality. That is in the "way out" category not explored much on this site, because I have tried presenting information that people can pursue, and have avoided impossible-to-demonstrate information that is usually derided as "conspiracy theory."
That all-too-real scenario of the Big Boys’ global control mechanism can seem depressing, but if enough people began waking up and caring about something beyond their egocentric existences, the Big Boys could not maintain their tyrannical grip for long. Finding and educating those people was why I made my website.
The math and physics that underlie zero-point energy and other unorthodox alternative energy technologies are not subjects that average Americans can easily study. What laypeople can study relatively easily, however, is why Dennis’s heat pump was the world's best heating system and why my mentor’s engine was the world’s best for powering an automobile. There are only so many hours in a day and years in a life, and I decided long ago to focus on studying the political-economic aspects of this situation, and this site’s material is easily studied by laypeople.
This section will conclude with a quote from Victor Marchetti, the first ex-CIA employee to really go public with what they really do, and The Brookings Institute's advice to NASA in 1960. Marchetti said:
"The purpose of the international conspiracy is to maintain a workable stability among the nations of the world and for them, in turn, to retain institutional control over their restive populations. Thus, for these governments to admit that there may be…technological capabilities obviously far superior…could, once fully perceived by the average person, erode the foundations of earth's traditional power structure. Political and legal systems, religious, economic and social institutions could all soon become meaningless in the mind of the public. The national oligarchical establishments, even civilization as we know it, would collapse into anarchy. Such extreme conclusions are not necessarily valid, but they probably accurately reflect the fears of the 'ruling classes' of the major nations, whose leaders (particularly in the intelligence business) have always advocated excessive governmental secrecy as being necessary to 'preserve national security.' The real reason for the secrecy is, of course, to keep the public uninformed, misinformed, and, therefore malleable."[28]
Soon after NASA was founded, it commissioned The Brookings Institute to write a report on the social implications of space exploration. The report was delivered to NASA in 1960. The report ended with some shocking recommendations and observations.
The report warned of the implications of discovering signs of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. It said that religious fundamentalists would be "electrified" by the discovery of life elsewhere, and said that scientists and engineers might be the most threatened of all by the discovery of intelligent life elsewhere, if it was significantly more advanced than ours. Those scientists and engineers:
"might be the most devastated by the discovery of relatively superior creatures, since these professions are most clearly associated with the mastery of nature, rather than with the understanding and expression of man. Advanced understanding of nature might vitiate all our theories at the very least, if not also require a culture and perhaps a brain inaccessible to the earth scientists."[29]
The report further stated,
"Anthropological files contain many examples of societies, sure of their place in the universe, which have disintegrated when they have had to associate with previously unfamiliar societies espousing different ideas and different life ways; others that survived such an experience usually did so by paying the price of changes in values and attitudes and behavior."[30]
Near the end the report stated,
"Questions one might wish to answer by such studies would include: How might such information, under what circumstances, be presented to or withheld [emphasis mine - Ed.] from the public for what ends? What might be the role of the discovering scientists and other decision makers regarding release of the fact of discovery?"[31]
There is little difference between the motivation to cover up UFOs, ETs or free energy.
The local courts dismissed our civil rights suits against the Ventura County sheriff's deputies. A few days later, Mr. Deputy and friends struck. Dennis was arrested with an orchestrated media splash across the Southern California media, and Dennis was jailed on $1 million bail in June 1988. The bail schedule for the crime Dennis supposedly committed was $5,000, but Mr. Deputy, who led the investigation, raid and arrest wrote a creative affidavit, asking that Dennis’s bail be raised to one million dollars. The judge rubber-stamped it.[32] The request is reproduced below.
Click on image to enlarge
What happened in Ventura made the Seattle experience pale by comparison. Dennis was the catch of Mr. Deputy's career, and a few weeks after arresting Dennis he was promoted to lieutenant, put in charge of the jail, and given an award for accomplishing the most difficult investigation in department history. At about thirty years of age, he was about Ventura County’s youngest man ever promoted to lieutenant. He received a strange promotion, from a sergeant-investigator. Strange, until one realized that he personally oversaw his career catch, seeing to his comfort. His sidekick also received a big promotion. Mr. Deputy had his finest hour after arresting Dennis and imposing an astronomical bail, by far the highest of the jail's 1,200 inmates, some in there for murder. Mr. Deputy had a steady stream of frightened employees kneeling in his office, begging for his mercy. Employees were making offers to steal documents from our office and deliver them to him, and he took them up on it! Such activities were documented in their investigative reports, and below is some documentation from one of them.
Click on image to enlarge
Mr. Deputy and friends were trying to put Dennis away for life. A civil law “violation” would be stretching it for a life sentence, so they invented a few fraud charges as well. The case was fabricated from start to finish, with fabricated victims, fabricated charges and a law nobody had heard of, while law enforcement personnel committed the boldest felonies. In order to make the fraud charges stick, they had to portray Dennis as a man selling no viable technologies. How they could do that, when Dennis was selling the best heating system the world market had ever seen, with government certified test data, I had no idea. I had yet to discover how Kangaroo Court operated.
As with Seattle, there appeared to be another energy-industry-hired saboteur in our ranks. He was a dealer from Texas (Mr. Texas) who tried ingratiating himself into the inner circle from the day he joined. When Dennis was arrested, Mr. Texas led an attempt to steal the organization. He easily manipulated the dealers and employees, and worked with the sheriff's department to keep Dennis in jail. Dennis’s wife was trying to raise the bail, and Mr. Texas discovered who put up bail collateral and threatened or lied to all of them so they would pull their collateral. He lied to one rancher who was putting up his ranch for collateral (who had installed one of our systems in his greenhouse and was saving nearly $500 a month with it) and told him that if Dennis were found guilty, the county would seize his ranch.[33] That was a spectacular, felonious lie, but if one works for the right people, it merits a raise, not jail. In a month of manipulation and rapacity, Mr. Texas and Mr. Deputy closed the company's doors.[34] Then Mr. Texas turned around and destroyed those who supported his power play.
In 2003, Mr. Texas was arrested in a religious scam, demonstrating that he may have been a free-lance criminal, not a provocateur, although the BPA Hit Man has also been involved in scamming the public in recent years. Mr. Texas’s tale provides an example of how difficult it can be to distinguish paid provocateurs from the everyday criminals that thickly populate America’s entrepreneurial waters, because they both act the same.[35] Mr. Skeptic, the latest and most persistent assailant that Dennis has encountered, may also be a free-lance assailant.
Destroying the business was done partly to ensure that Dennis had no money to defend himself. After the business was destroyed, Mr. Deputy made sure that nobody with technical expertise would testify at Dennis’s trial. Demonstrating the viability of the technologies that Dennis promoted would ruin the railroad job.
Every inventor and technical employee and/or consultant disappeared when Dennis went to jail. Some of them crawled into Mr. Deputy's office, begging for his mercy. Mr. Deputy convinced them all that testifying on Dennis’s behalf would make them a suspect themselves, and most wanted convincing anyway, which was why they crawled into Mr. Deputy's office. Mr. Deputy told anybody who needed convincing that they might occupy the cell next to Dennis’s if they did not work with the prosecution.
The most heart-rending situation was Mr. Researcher's. He lived locally and had unimpeachable credentials. He saw what they did to his office during the raid, yet got on his knees and crawled into Mr. Deputy's office, saying every bad thing about Dennis that he could. Yet, he also knew the technology worked, and told Mr. Deputy so. Mr. Deputy began yelling at him, telling him that if he testified that the technology worked, he could expect to go to jail.[36]
Mr. Texas strolled through our offices the day he successfully closed the company's doors. He told the employees that anybody who kept working there would be arrested. The employees stampeded out the door. They fled before payday, and were owed one-week's wages. Therefore, many stole anything that was not nailed down as they left. They stole our computers, office equipment, camera equipment, records and even equipment we had rented. Our machinist sold our entire machine shop, pocketed the money and left town.
Dennis’s wife was desperately trying to raise the bail collateral. The bail bonding company kept changing their bail requirements, frightened by the obviously political nature of Dennis’s incarceration. To try denying Dennis the chance to get out on bail, the Ventura County court set a new legal precedent. The SAMP charge had one precedent in California's history. The motion the DA filed to deny bail had one precedent in United States history. The DA filed a "Motion to Examine Sources of Bail." The only precedent in U.S. history was the case of a New Jersey drug lord who sold a million dollars worth of heroin to raise his bail. Equating a SAMP with heroin dealing, the DA filed the motion. The logic was that since the "crime" was related to the business Dennis ran, he could not use any money from his business, money he might have received in salary from his business, or any assets of any of his business associates. That ruling would put Bill Gates in jail with no chance of making bail.
During those days, I was not enjoying myself. The year before, in addition to working seventy hours a week, raising money, bringing in the technical talent and working for practically nothing (my personal income for those years was about $4,000 per year), I lent the company my American Express card to help the cash flow. When Dennis was arrested, his wife, in her desperation to get him out of jail, did not pay off my credit card so she could pay the wages for those "loyal" employees who stole everything that was not nailed down. When it all came crashing down, I was stuck with $27,000 on my credit card. I tried working it out with American Express, but they preferred forcing me into bankruptcy, which I did before the year was out.
In the autumn of 1988, Dennis was sitting in jail with his astronomical bail. I was driving to LA, working as a temporary employee. I was going blind in a basement, looking at microfiche all day long, reconciling a garnishment account for a huge security company. I was trying to save enough money to file for bankruptcy, and was helping Dennis however I could. Dennis’s preliminary hearing was nearing. Mr. Professor took in Dennis’s wife and children and supporting the entire operation to try rescuing Dennis. He ended up spending hundreds of thousands of dollars of his own money. Those events helped destroy his health and nearly killed him, and in fact led to his early death.
Mr. Deputy’s efforts were largely successful. He chased off every technical expert. One way the court kept certified test data suppressed was by ruling that the person who performed the testing would introduce the only admissible data. Destroying his company helped ensure that Dennis had no money by, so he could not afford to bring witnesses to the trial.
In Arizona a few years earlier, a government-certified lab produced test data on our heat pump. One test measured a COP of more than seven, which was a typical result. They were close to California, and we might have gotten them to testify. Their data could have been a problem for Mr. Deputy's case, but he adroitly handled the situation. A sheriff’s deputy wrote a letter to that Arizona lab, staging that Dennis was using their name and test data to pull off a scam, and that the unit they tested was not the one that Dennis promoted. That was in the Big Lie category. It was the same equipment. Later, the president of the company that hired the lab asked them for a certified copy of their data. His company paid for the tests. The lab wrote him back a strange letter, stating that their attorney was advising them. They would only provide certified test data if he wrote a letter stating that the unit they tested was not the one that Dennis promoted, and that he had no business connection with Dennis.[37] Then the lying letter the deputy used to scare them surfaced.
When the preliminary hearing was held, the nearly paraplegic Dennis attended it in leg irons. They violated Dennis’s civil rights almost daily in jail, as they tried breaking his spirit. Since Mr. Deputy was promoted to run the jail, Dennis received extra-special treatment. The prosecution had perhaps the most extravagant preliminary hearing in county history. They brought in more than twenty witnesses from across America. They spared no expense, spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to prosecute Dennis. Meanwhile, the defense was broke. The only technical witness locally available was Mr. Researcher, but remembering Mr. Deputy's threats when he was on his knees, he quailed and hid to avoid the subpoena that Dennis’s lawyer was trying to serve him.
That left me as the key witness. The prosecution subpoenaed me several times, in what was probably an attempt to intimidate me. Some people, seeking self-preservation above all else, tried convincing me to fall on my knees in front of Mr. Deputy and beg for his mercy. Again, virtually nobody "got it." Mr. Deputy’s reign of terror was so effective that only Mr. Professor, a few other people and I were not frightened into running away. With everybody gone, I became Dennis’s star witness.
The defense was in such straits that I testified to thermodynamics and the technology. I could do a fair job of presenting it, but had no credentials that the court would recognize.
In retrospect, testifying was a pivotal moment. I did not come to that conclusion until relatively recently. Life-changing events are not always obvious while one experiences them. I took a day off from work to testify, and spent several hours on the witness stand. I had never been in a courtroom before meeting Dennis. I had quite a first experience. When I walked into the courtroom, it was nearly empty. Just as I walked in, Mr. Deputy stood a few feet away. He was talking with the local newspaper's reporter. The reporter looked younger than me, and I was only thirty. They engaged in furtive laughter as I walked in. The local paper was particularly merciless and libelous in reporting Dennis’s case. That cub reporter (Mr. Cub Reporter) wrote most of the stories. The situation I witnessed recalled an arrogant fraternity brother holding court with an obsequious pledge. Mr. Deputy was regaling Mr. Cub Reporter with the dirt on Dennis. It was a conversation along the lines of, "And let me tell you something else, buddy," with Mr. Cub Reporter's jaw dropping open as Mr. Deputy told him another sensational revelation about what a criminal Dennis was. Mr. Cub Reporter was trying to contain his laughter, but not very effectively. Their charade dominated the room as I entered.
I was gradually discovering the reality of where I was raised. Ventura County has one of America’s most corrupt judicial systems. A few years after I testified, Ventura County made news by acquitting the officers charged in the Rodney King beating trial, an event that triggered riots in Los Angeles. It also has one of most corrupt police forces, and even makes the top ten lists of people who track such things. The local newspaper is part of the corruption. I was discovering it firsthand.
It seemed that our attorney had been privately told what the program was. He was probably threatened with vengeance if he vigorously defended Dennis, but he never admitted to us what happened.
The high theater that greeted me while walking into the courtroom was merely a warm-up. Ms. Prosecutor was a local law school graduate (the place nearly looked like a barn, and graduates of it often acted like it was one[38]), and she prosecuted the case from the moment Dennis was arrested. Technically, he no longer had a million-dollar bail. In the first bail hearing the judge reduced it to a paltry $750,000, which was still by far the highest bail of the 1,200 county jail inmates. At that hearing, I was shocked to hear Ms. Prosecutor telling outrageous lies. If Dennis had ever told a lie remotely as big as the ones I heard her tell, he would still be behind bars. Soon after Dennis was arrested, his lawyer approached Ms. Prosecutor, asking her if they could work out a deal. Her response to Dennis’s attorney was, "If he pleads guilty to all charges, I will see that he doesn't get the death penalty!"
Dennis’s attorney made no preparations to defend Dennis. Dennis and his wife were doing all the work. They prepared cue cards so the attorney would ask the right questions. About the only time he spent on the case was in the courtroom. Dennis and his wife prepared about seventy questions to ask me. It was going to take a long time. As soon as I got on the witness stand, the judge broadcasted an obvious attitude. Prosecution witnesses go first and defense witnesses last in trails, to favor the defendant’s innocence, because the most recent testimony is what the jury would probably best remember. I was the defense's star witness, and could testify to many practices that could determine fraudulent intent regarding our business. I handled all the money and helped run the business. My testimony would be key to the fraud issue, but as I mounted the witness stand, the judge made a statement regarding how long the trial was taking, and that he hoped my testimony would be brief. The prosecution spent endless time and money with their witnesses, while the defense had to be quick about it, and usher their star witness off the stand as soon as possible.
The raid happened on January 14th, and Dennis was not arrested until late June. In the intervening months, Mr. Deputy and friends took our customer list and called all of our customers. They were fishing for "victims." As in Seattle and Boston, in Ventura the investigation did not begin because victims complained to the authorities. When there are no victims, they must be manufactured. That was what Mr. Deputy spent the majority of those months doing. They called all our customers, asking them leading questions about their satisfaction with our company.
The ranks of Dennis’s organizations have always been filled with constitutionalists and other political activists. They knew we were not only about making money with a free energy machine. They knew that our project might be one of freedom's last chances, so many customers rudely received Mr. Deputy’s fishing expedition. They told him where he could stick his "investigation," particularly ones outside of California, knowing that the long arm of his corruption could not easily reach them. His response was to uncooperative "victims" was threatening them: telling them that if they continued to participate in the organization, they would be suspects themselves. Mr. Deputy was trying to scare away anybody associated with the company, threatening them with jail. He told Dennis’s salesmen that they could spend sixty years in prison for working at our company.[39]
After his campaign of cajoling and intimidation, Mr. Deputy rounded up nine "victims" from our hundreds of customers. They worked through the customer list in alphabetical order. One day we would hear from a customer whose last name began with an "A." The next week we would hear from a customer whose last name began with a "C," telling us that Mr. Deputy (or sometimes the sheriff himself) had contacted them. Who were the nine "victims?" One "victim" had his check lost in the raid, so he never paid for his materials. Another "victim" was from our early days in Ventura, before we had our operation running smoothly. He lived locally and we lent him the materials, telling him he could bring them back if he did not like them, or pay for them if he did. He was one of many thieves that we encountered. He took our materials then reneged on his promise to either return them or pay for them. We made numerous calls to him. Every time we called, he told us a cheap lie such as, "The check is in the mail." That charade went on for about nine months. We chalked it up to experience. He had actually stolen our materials, and he was one of the victims.
Another "victim" bought our materials and liked our technology so much that he set up a competing organization, trying to lure our customers away to his operation. His victimhood was an attempt to wipe out the competition. His testimony was ironically the only one accepted by the court where somebody testified to the high COPs our system got. He testified for the prosecution, telling the court that the system he bought from us and installed achieved a COP of nine, and that he was trying to build a free energy machine himself using Dennis’s technology. He was quite a victim.
Before the raid, we had a policy of a ten-day free trial. We would Federal Express our materials to the customer. If they did not send back the materials in ten days (at our expense), they bought it. The prosecution might have had a legitimate case with that policy. Depending on the state, consumer protection laws can require that the refund period be extended to months, not only ten days. I doubt they even tried that angle. Since all of our records were seized, we had no idea of the status of many orders. In the raid's wake, we were battling just to keep the doors open. After about six weeks of trying to operate with my records gone, I began going into a general physical collapse, caused by the stress. I was looking like a raccoon again. We were understandably slow in getting out refunds to customers that we had no record of.
Another "victim" purchased his materials just before the raid. Through records on our computers, we at least had the phone numbers of many of our customers. We called all our customers we knew of, asking them to send us whatever documentation they had. We called him, and when he heard what had happened he called Mr. Deputy to find out more. It is easy to imagine how that conversation went. After talking to Mr. Deputy, the man returned his materials. In the pandemonium of trying to survive the raid, that man who returned his materials did not receive a prompt refund. He called our office, saying that Mr. Deputy had talked to him, asking him to sue our company. I talked to the customer. He told me he had returned his materials within the ten-day trial period, but had not yet received his refund. I told him some of our problems, and said I would expedite his refund if I could find his properly returned package in our building. I hung up the phone, searched our office, and found his properly returned materials. I prepared a refund check and overnighted it to him. I enclosed a note with his refund check, apologizing for the delay in refunding his money, and asked him if he could send us a note, telling us what Mr. Deputy told him. The man paid for his materials, returned them according to our terms (when scared into it by Mr. Deputy), and we refunded his money, as we did for every customer who properly returned the materials. That man was one of the nine "victims."
Mr. Deputy visited some of our customers; the ones close enough to easily drive to. Mr. Deputy thought he would be more effective in manufacturing victims if he personally met them. One customer lived in the San Fernando Valley, about an hour's drive from Ventura. The San Fernando Valley is in Los Angeles County, out of Ventura County's jurisdiction. Mr. Deputy appeared at the man's house, unannounced, and began asking his clever and leading questions. Mr. Deputy was an expert manipulator, which was partly why his career was so successful. The man in the San Fernando Valley had not paid for his materials (he asked us to not cash his check, and we did not), believed in what we were doing, and thought that Dennis was the finest human being he had ever met. He became increasingly irritated with Mr. Deputy's line of questioning, told Mr. Deputy the interview was over, and further told Mr. Deputy to get off his property. That man became another "victim." The man did not even know he was a "victim." He was shocked when asked on the witness stand why he was pressing charges against Dennis. He said he did not think he was a victim, and he thought it was horrible what they had done to Dennis. That victim was quickly crossed off the victim list by the prosecution.
Of the nine "victims," only one truly acted like a victim, and his story bears telling. After the raid, we realized what laws they were using against us, and we got educated. The SAMP law was about making disclosures. The law provided a "cure" if it had been violated. Our crime was not filing a one-page form with the California Secretary of State and paying fifty dollars. That was the crime, and that is what they "got" Dennis on. He spent two years behind bars for that "crime." Part of the "cure" was offering refunds for inadvertent violations of the law. Dennis had a "Cure Tour" a few weeks after the raid, offering refunds to those who wanted them.[40] I attended one in Los Angeles. Dennis told the story of what happened, what he was planning on doing, and letting anybody out who wanted to. When Dennis speaks at events like that, people regain their faith and support him. It is one of his talents, for better or worse.
At that Los Angeles "cure" meeting, during the question-and-answer period, one man looked like an off-duty deputy and began making rude and accusatory remarks about Dennis. He sounded like an abrasive lawyer. People were shying away from him as he made an ass out of himself in public. He had purchased our materials and wanted his refund. The event was for people to get refunds if they wanted them. The man was not satisfied with merely getting his refund, but made a scene about how crooked he thought Dennis was. He was even quoting what Mr. Deputy said about Dennis. In another venue, the crowd might have pounded him to a pulp, but we ushered him from the room and told him that if he sent his materials to our office, he would receive his refund. He then made the strange remark that that was all he wanted. He acted like the BPA hit man and other provocateurs I have seen. He reminded me of the ruthless kind I often saw in Los Angeles during my early CPA days. Being in his presence was unpleasant.
A few days later, I accepted the return of his materials and gave him his refund. He showed up at our office with his wife. Because I was about to give him his money, he wore an unctuous air, heaping on the fake friendliness a lemon-selling used car salesman might use while closing the rip-off deal. His wife made some compliment about a picture on my wall, and I affably handled them, trying to get them out of the office as quickly as possible. At the preliminary hearing, he acted like the biggest "victim" of them all. He apparently was as obnoxious on the witness stand as he was at the "cure" meeting. Getting a total refund was not enough, the man reasoned. He had spent hours reading the material we sent him, and thought he should be reimbursed for his time spent reading the material, at a lawyer’s rate per hour.
Dennis was sitting there in leg irons with a $750,000 bail. He had been in jail for five months at that time, and that man had the gall to claim a right to be paid for his time in reading Dennis’s material. If anybody was a plant from the sheriff's department, he was it. Those were the "victims" that Mr. Deputy made his career-crowning case on, trying to imprison Dennis for life.
Ms. Prosecutor asked me if I had ever heard Mr. Researcher "tell Dennis he was going too fast?" Immediately the defense objected, because that kind of question Mr. Researcher should have answered, not me. I am not a lawyer, but it had something to do with hearsay, I believe. The judge overruled the defense's objection and ordered me to answer the question. I truthfully said, "No.” I suppose it was not the answer they wanted, because a few seconds after I answered, the judge said, "I reverse myself. Strike that testimony from the record." It was my first experience on a witness stand, and I was in Kangaroo Court. A year later, in the heat of other grim situations, Ms. Prosecutor accused me of perjury for my answer, the one the judge struck from the record.[41]
Dennis’s lawyer would not even read the cue cards properly. After barely asking me any questions about the business, he said, "I have no further questions for this witness." There was a surprised snort from Dennis, and he almost strangled his attorney, whispering fiercely, and his attorney said, "I'm sorry your honor, I have a few more questions for this witness." Then the judge became piqued, telling Dennis’s attorney that he would allow a few more questions, but that time was short and they needed to get me off the stand as quickly as possible, to stop wasting the court's time. I left the witness stand having answered about ten percent of the questions prepared for me.
That situation was merely the backdrop for my pivotal moment. The part that changed my life was Mr. Deputy's performance. While I testified, Mr. Deputy sat next to Ms. Prosecutor. The way the courtroom was arranged, he sat directly in front of me, about twenty-to-thirty feet away. Those on the witness stand looked directly into his face. Apparently, the proceedings were not rigged enough for Mr. Deputy. He tried intimidating me as I testified. His charade with the reporter was only a warm-up. When I testified about thermodynamics, the prosecution protested. Then Ms. Prosecutor thought she could show how ignorant I was, and asked me what I knew about Carnot and thermodynamics. My answer showed that I knew a little about it. Mr. Deputy made faces at me while I testified. His reaction after I testified about thermodynamics was a theatrical expression that conveyed, "Gee, the kid knows something. Give him a point."
Before my testimony on thermodynamics, Mr. Deputy made a number of disdainful reactions. His sidekick was sitting in the public seats behind him. When I made a statement, Mr. Deputy would dramatically turn his body around, put his hand next to his mouth, and act as if he was talking to his sidekick. His body would shake as if he was laughing. When he finished making his comment, (nearly silent, but not quite) he would turn back to face me, always trying to wipe a feces eating grin off his face, but never quite succeeding. It was never to the point of disrupting the proceedings, but he was playing Marcel Marceau, my pantomiming adversary, as I was testifying. If a child did that in a fifth grade classroom, the teacher would swiftly put an end to it. In Kangaroo Court, the judge and Ms. Prosecutor pointedly ignored his imbecilic behavior. Sometimes he would snort when I said something.
My future wife took the afternoon off from work to watch me testify. Other than Dennis’s wife, Mr. Cub Reporter and Mr. Sidekick, my future wife was the only person in the public seating. Mr. Deputy was not jumping into the air and doing jumping jacks, but sitting directly in front of me, which was surely no accident. There was a brief recess while I testified, and I asked my wife if she had noticed Mr. Deputy's gyrations. She did not, as she was far more focused on me. I told her to keep an eye on him while I testified after the recess, and she could see what kind of trial it was. Mr. Deputy did not disappoint her. His faces, gestures and theatrical asides to Mr. Sidekick escalated after the recess. His sweeping gestures even took in Mr. Cub Reporter. The newspaper articles that Mr. Cub Reporter wrote about the trial were virtually dictation from Mr. Deputy.
The last question I was asked was how much money the company took in during a certain span of time. When I said about $2 million, Mr. Deputy nearly leapt out his chair, turning his body all the way around, gesturing to Mr. Sidekick and Mr. Cub Reporter. Mr. Cub Reporter even began laughing, so my wife said. Apparently, they were trying to make a connection between the gross revenues of a company and how much money Dennis "stole." It was an ignorant sentiment, repeated in Mr. Cub Reporter's next article, which was published the next day. The term "gross revenues" does not mean it went into Dennis’s pocket, which was one of the many malicious rumors that Mr. Deputy had circulated. He was telling everybody that Dennis had jammed millions of dollars into his pockets somehow. It was an outrageous lie, which anybody with any business experience knows well.
Mr. Deputy's performance was in November of 1988. After the pitiful defense was finished, the judge remanded the case to trial, and then came the wait until trial. At that point, after seeing how the preliminary hearing went, it looked like Dennis had a snowball's chance in hell. I was still working as a temporary employee, looking for permanent work in LA, preparing my bankruptcy filing. Mr. Researcher fled into hiding to avoid the subpoena, and was in hiding for months. It was a grim December. I found work in Los Angeles as an accountant in a medical lab, and began work the week before Christmas, the day after I filed for bankruptcy. There were several betrayals by my friends and family during those days, and some were major. December 1988 was my life’s worst month so far.
A few days later, it was Christmas. Dennis is a literalist Christian, which is related to his migrant farm worker upbringing. I will take the loving parts of any religion, and when Dennis is not attacking homosexuals or feminists because the Bible says he can, he has the love part of Christianity down fairly well, about as well as I have seen. His stay in the county jail was not pleasant. Dennis was about eighty pounds overweight when he was arrested. During his life he has often fasted, usually for the biblical forty days. For his first month in jail, Dennis was just trying to survive. In jail, the meals had a calorie intake barely above the starvation level. That was partly because of the county’s corruption; the money not spent on the prisoners’ food made it into a government official's pocket.[42] Hunger was a constant for the prisoners.
Dennis fasted for his first month in jail, but went to all the meals and gave his meals to the biggest, meanest guys there. He made friends fast. Dennis is so charismatic and amazing that within a month he was running his cellblock, and had transformed his cellblock from a place of fear into a dormitory atmosphere. Dennis, as his wife said, blooms where he is planted. Dennis decided that as long as he was in jail, he could do his Christian ministry there. He had a welcome wagon for new inmates. He saved up his chocolate ration to give to new inmates who were kicking heroin cold turkey, because chocolate helps the withdrawal symptoms. Mr. Deputy did not want Dennis getting too comfortable. After a month, just when Dennis had transformed the environment in his cellblock to a dorm atmosphere, he was suddenly moved to a new cellblock where he knew nobody. That was a violation of Dennis’s rights, but it was simply part of the psychological warfare that Mr. Deputy and his minions were waging to break Dennis’s spirit. Somebody paid the county officials handsomely to keep the heat on Dennis, but some of his treatment was probably just sadistic, free-lance malice, engaged in by those who ran the jail.
Dennis also became a jailhouse lawyer, visiting the jail’s law library as often as he could. He filed more than one hundred legal motions while he was in jail.[43] He also eventually ran his new cellblock. After the farce of a preliminary hearing came and went, it looked bleak. Dennis wrote the story of his adventures after the preliminary hearing. It became his book My Quest.
With Christmas near, Dennis was his usual extravagant self. He was going to throw a Christmas party for his inmates, and then tell them about his interpretation of Christmas. There were about thirty-five inmates in his cellblock. Mr. Professor contributed $50 so Dennis could throw his party. It worked out to about $1.50 per inmate. The jail had a commissary, and inmates could have an account to buy things in it, such as cigarettes, candy, paper, pencils, etc. Dennis was going to buy Christmas gifts for the inmates from the commissary. The commissary account had a limit of $30. Dennis had it split $30 on his account and $20 on a cellmate's, and they planned the party. Suddenly, Dennis’s inmate was transferred to another cellblock and Dennis was thrown into solitary confinement. He had violated rule number 38, which said he could not transfer money or goods to another inmate.[44]
As with the SAMP law, the intent of the law and its execution by evil-minded people are like night and day. They were turning down the screws on Dennis, to break him for trial. They also knew he was writing a book that did not flatter them. They tried it on the wrong man. Dennis was able to make collect phone calls, and he talked to me from solitary confinement. He told me how peaceful and quiet solitary confinement was, and how he got more writing and research done in solitary. Ministering to his inmates was taking his time, and solitary was like a vacation for him. I have never met another like him.
Meanwhile on the outside, I was driving to Los Angeles every day. When I drove home, I passed by the county government complex. It had a park-like setting, but I knew Dennis sat in that tall building in the distance, and it appeared that he would never live to see this side of the bars again. It was at about that time that I had my worst moment. I am an avowed pacifist, and have not touched a weapon since I shot a BB gun as a boy. At that time, I found myself thinking that getting a shotgun and "cleaning up" Ventura might not be such a bad idea. That I could even be brought to have thoughts such as that, however fleeting, was the most horrifying part of my entire journey. I immediately dismissed such thoughts as a product of my pain, but that I could be reduced to even imaging those scenes of violence was about as soiled as I have ever felt. I had gone far past losing my innocence, wondering what horrors the next day would bring.
I decided to do whatever I could to save Dennis’s life. During those dark days, Dennis’s wife encountered other victims of Ventura County's legal system. Perhaps the most effort in fighting Ventura County’s corruption was Gary Wean’s. He became a friend of Dennis’s wife in their common plight. Gary wrote a book about his adventures, published the year before Dennis was arrested, titled There's a Fish in the Courthouse. I obtained a copy through Dennis’s wife and began reading. I was almost afraid to go to bed with the light off after reading it.
Gary was a policeman who worked in Los Angeles for a decade, then moved to Ventura County, then back to Los Angeles to become an investigator for the LA District Attorney's office. He did that for seven years, and then moved back to Ventura County in 1964. According to Gary, political murder was common in Ventura County. I obtained his telephone number from Dennis’s wife and called his home. I talked to his wife, who was brusque until I told her who I was. Then she became friendly, telling me that they did not trust anybody who called them out of the blue. Gary was at a meeting that evening, trying to help some local people prevent a land grab by Ventura County’s plutocrats. He went out of his way to meet me that evening.
We talked awhile about Dennis and our experiences. Gary discussed some of his adventures, and remarked that he was live primarily because he never broke the law. Otherwise, they would have found an excuse to murder him long ago. Gary was an old time policeman who believed in the law and its potential for justice. Gary believed the law could work if properly enforced. While he could not claim many victories while challenging the legal gangsters, he believed he someday might.
I asked Gary how I could help Dennis. I would meet with somebody in government, any government, to intercede. Gary said, "Nobody in any American jurisdiction will help you. They are all in the same club. If you are going to help Dennis, you must do it alone." Gary suggested that I refile my civil rights lawsuit in the local court, to put the heat on them. Gary had been waging lawsuits against them for many years. Gary had to become his own attorney because no attorney would help him. Any attorney that might was threatened with disbarment. While I respected Gary's opinion, trying to beat them in their own court seemed futile.
Mr. Deputy and friends were attempting to secure a fraud conviction, and had to portray Dennis as a criminal selling no viable technologies. The SAMP Act was a civil law, and a forty-year sentence because Dennis did not file a form would be a stretch even for them. Mr. Deputy also knew that, which was why he intimidated all of Dennis’s technical people. Several had impeccable credentials regarding the technologies, and if any of them testified, Mr. Deputy and friends would have difficulty making the fraud charges stick. Although Dennis’s experts fled, others had experience with Dennis’s heat pump and could credibly testify to its performance. At the preliminary hearing, the "experts" the prosecution paraded onto the witness stand included: two ex-Seattle employees who tried extorting money from us a year earlier and had a poor understanding of the technology, and one demonstrated it in court; an electric company consultant who had never seen Dennis’s heat pump run but testified that it would not work; and a college professor whose experience was limited to once testing a broken system.
I thought that if Dennis had competent expert witnesses testify, he had a chance to beat the fraudulent fraud charges. Dennis was writing that he would never be free again.[45] By that time, Dennis was out of solitary, but they were turning the screws down harder each day. They had him hog-tied in jail, and even began threatening him.
With little hope of freeing Dennis from jail, I did the only thing I could: I mortgaged my life. Mr. Professor was trying to keep the business alive and was housing Dennis’s family. Mr. Professor taught at the local college for more than twenty years and was one of Ventura’s most respected people. At the college, he was beloved by all. He was a millionaire before he met Dennis, and those events comprised his life’s most educational and horrifying experience. I was raised in Ventura, but Mr. Professor was a pillar of the community. As with me, the more corruption Mr. Professor saw, the more determined he was to stand up to it.
In late February of 1989, I approached Mr. Professor. I asked him to mortgage his home and lend me $50,000 for some kind of defense. He asked his wife, and the next week they decided to lend me the money. When they agreed, I was torn by several emotions. I was relieved that I could help Dennis, but I had just guaranteed that I would be spending the next ten years of my life paying off the loan, at 10% interest, and it probably would not help much.
After the preliminary hearing, they began finding Dennis "guilty" of an infraction nearly every day. During his first six months in jail he had none, but he was suddenly being written up every day. It was designed to make Dennis seem less than the model prisoner. When Dennis had an attorney, the jail was caught opening his legal mail. Private correspondence between attorneys and their clients is one of our legal system's sacred cornerstones.
After the preliminary hearing, Dennis’s lawyer said that he needed big money to continue representing Dennis, and quit. Dennis was his own attorney after that. Dennis was also writing My Quest. The jailers used the excuse that Dennis wrote about his God in his manuscript, and announced that they would read everything passing between him and the outside world, to limit his proselytizing. All his phone conversations were recorded, and all his mail was read. The deputy running the jail read all of Dennis’s writings, bragging that he could read thousands of words per minute. Dennis had no private contact with the outside world. Mr. Researcher was still in hiding.
During the next month, the tide began turning. When the case was remanded to Superior Court, Dennis finally had one judge presiding over his case. Dennis had previously made eight bail appeals, all summarily rejected. They all upheld Mr. Deputy's astronomical bail request. The Superior Court judge who inherited the case had a tar baby on his hands. If Dennis were convicted, that judge would be responsible for how his treatment went. Dennis believed it was no accident that that particular judge got Dennis’s case. Dennis said he was the county’s smartest judge.
Mr. Deputy's million-dollar-bail affidavit was a creative writing exercise. His rationale was a combination of misrepresenting Dennis’s "criminal" past, promoting his credentials as a fraud expert, and the logic of Dennis’s victims hiding him from "justice." Mr. Deputy asserted that the very people Dennis was defrauding would create a national underground network to hide him from the law. The DA's precedent-setting "Motion to Examine Sources of Bail" was one of many irregularities in Dennis’s treatment.
The judge had a problem: Mr. Deputy and friends were not letting up in jail. The prosecution tried burying the defense in sheer paperwork. The prosecution introduced ten thousand pages of documents into discovery evidence. Documents that Dennis’s employees stole comprised much of it. Dennis had to sift through the discovery evidence. The jail was a new, state-of-the-art facility, and building the County Center was a huge theft from Ventura County’s taxpayers, as chronicled in There's a Fish in the Courthouse. If one building were the least likely to burn down in Ventura, it would have been the county jail.
A jail rule stated that an inmate was allotted one cardboard box for his personal effects. With ten thousand pages of discovery evidence, which Dennis’s wife had to copy at her own expense at the courthouse (paying to copy documents stolen from us was ironic), one box would not hold it all. Their rules only allowed Dennis one box, but they introduced two boxes of evidence. One of Dennis’s legal motions was to have two boxes to hold the evidence against him; the DA and jail said that two boxes were a fire hazard.
The judge granted Dennis’s request over Ms. Prosecutor’s heated objections. It was about Dennis’s first legal "victory." After he won his "big victory," the man running the jail came to Dennis’s cell (who also read all of Dennis’s correspondence) and told Dennis that if the jail burned down because of Dennis’s second box of papers, he would take personal vengeance on him, which was a thinly-veiled threat to his life.
We will probably only know a small fraction of their evil deeds. For instance, they tapped our telephones. One technique of phone taps, particularly illegal ones, is using the phone line to transmit the recorded conversations to a central recorder. A friend from my childhood, who worked at Dennis’s company, heard his conversation from a day earlier being transmitted to the central recorder. He picked up the phone while the transfer was in progress, and was stunned. If his phone calls were recorded, mine, Dennis’s, Mr. Professor’s, Mr. Researcher’s and others’ phones were certainly tapped. That phenomenon of phone lines used to transmit recorded conversations, and somebody picking up the phone during transmission, I independently heard of, but with illegal wiretaps. My phone has probably been tapped for the last twenty years. While they were tapping phones in Ventura County, they also scrutinized Dennis’s phone conversations and read all his mail in or out.
In the years after Dennis escaped jail, Mr. Professor regularly received calls from Dennis’s former cellmates (Mr. Professor's home was Dennis’s only phone number for years). They called to thank the man who changed their lives, and to tell him how they were doing.
With my legal fund, Dennis hired an attorney, but we got an attorney who had never worked in a courtroom. However, it provided Dennis legal mail, to regain a sliver of privacy. The jail had already been caught opening his legal mail, and the judge reprimanded them.
Dennis had been winning minor motions, such as getting two boxes to hold the evidence against him, but in late March 1989, the judge asked Dennis why he had not made a motion regarding his astronomical bail. Dennis had previously submitted eight bail appeals, all rejected except for the first one, when the judge lowered it to $750,000. Dennis said that a bail appeal was premature because he was assembling one last bail appeal before trial. The judge replied, "Then I am making my own motion to review your seemingly excessive bail."
Dennis’s wife assembled the bail appeal material, including affidavits regarding the threats that Mr. Deputy made to employees, witnesses and anybody else who might obstruct their plan. Dennis’s wife was his legal runner, which allowed her to spend more time with him than the thirty minutes per week allowed for visitors. A few days before the scheduled bail hearing, Dennis’s wife told him that she was sending him affidavits regarding Mr. Deputy’s threats.[46]
Legal mail was delivered directly to the inmate, bypassing normal mail delivery. That package was delivered several hours late, with the regular mail, and it had been opened. When opened package was delivered, Dennis had his fellow inmates witness it and sign a statement to that effect. The deputy delivering the mail was flustered. Dennis had another motion to add to his bail appeal. They were caught doing something for which the judge had already reprimanded them.
I attended the bail hearing to testify to Dennis’s character. Mr. Professor and his wife were there. Mr. Deputy showed up with his own lawyer. The judge opened the hearing by saying that Dennis made several motions regarding the jail’s and Mr. Deputy’s misconduct. Mr. Deputy's lawyer apologized profusely for opening Dennis’s legal mail, and claimed it was an innocent mistake. He would produce a deputy to admit to the clerical error and testify that nobody saw the package's contents except him. The judge thanked the attorney for his apology, and said that he was certain that it would not happen again.
Then the judge noted that Dennis’s "victims" appeared to have paid $20,000 (it was actually $14,000). The judge then lowered the bail to Dennis’s own recognizance, with a $20,000 restitution deposit posted to reimburse the "victims" if Dennis was found guilty. Mr. Professor said that Mr. Deputy looked as if he had swallowed his shoe. The next day, April Fools Day, Mr. Professor took $20,000 from my legal fund and paid Dennis’s bail.
Meanwhile, Dennis was saying farewell to his inmates. Although they threw Dennis into solitary confinement for trying to throw a Christmas party, Dennis had an Easter celebration in jail, replete with an Easter egg hunt. Dennis came from the hearing and said, "The judge reduced my bail to my own recognizance!" His inmates gave a cheer and hoisted him onto their shoulders, while the jailers witnessed the spectacle in mute awe.
Dennis’s books adequately document events from there. The only way Mr. Deputy and friends could put Dennis away for life was having him hog-tied and defenseless. When Dennis escaped jail and hired a nationally known attorney (Mr. Big Time Attorney), the fraud charges were quickly dismissed. As the true nature of Mr. Deputy's investigation became clearer, from fabricated victims to threatened witnesses to intimidated parties such as the Arizona test lab, his career-making case began crumbling.
Mr. Big Time Attorney was the United States’ leading attorney in defending U.S. citizens against the Internal Revenue Service’s (IRS) depredations. One of his cases went to the U.S. Supreme Court, and dealt with crimes committed by IRS agents while prosecuting his client. In a case with parallels to Dennis’s, the Supreme Court ruled that IRS agents had committed felonies while pursuing Mr. Big Time Attorney's client, but also ruled that such crimes did not taint the government’s case. The IRS agents would be prosecuted independently. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall notably dissented from the majority opinion. Such Supreme Court rulings are not unusual. In 1992, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the U.S. Justice department was legally kidnapping people from Mexico because the extradition treaty with Mexico did not specifically say, “no kidnapping allowed.”
The intervention to put George Bush the Second into the presidency is simply another instance of the Supreme Court’s criminal behavior. Mr. Big Time Attorney’s client had to face trial and was found innocent. Mr. Big Time Attorney was moving to San Diego from Colorado, and Dennis went to see him. While other nationally known attorneys were asking for a $250,000 retainer to defend him, Mr. Big Time Attorney was so impressed with Dennis’s case that he asked for a mere $10,000 retainer. That finished my $50,000 loan. Mr. Big Time Attorney later said that what originally drew him to Dennis’s case was the million-dollar bail. "Is a SAMP a deadly weapon?" he asked me. "Was Dennis beating people over the head with his SAMP filing?" Mr. Big Time Attorney took Dennis’s case more to sue county officials for violating Dennis’s civil rights than winning Dennis’s trial, which he believed would be easy.
Mr. Big Time Attorney provided more visibility into what was happening behind the scenes. For instance, about a month before the raid, an attorney flew from Virginia to give us $10,000 for two full kits of materials. He was Ed Meese’s friend, Meese being the U.S. Attorney General. I have no admiration for the Reagan-Bush administrations, but Meese was the nation’s highest-ranking prosecutor. That attorney asked Meese about Dennis, and Meese knew Dennis by name, replying, "We have investigated Dennis thoroughly, and he is squeaky clean." The attorney emphasized the words "squeaky clean" as he handed Dennis the check. Meese’s tenure was tainted with scandals, but if he said that about Dennis, it was not because Dennis had Meese in his hip pocket. During the raid, as Mr. Deputy talked about the SAMP law, I told him what Meese said. Mr. Deputy replied with a grin, rather gleefully dismissing what the nation’s highest-ranking prosecutor had to say.
Mr. Big Time Attorney asked his FBI friends for what they had on Dennis. The reply was something like, "Wow! The FBI's files on Dennis are huge, as are the CIA’s."
Soon after Dennis’s 1996 Philadelphia show, Yull Brown, whom Dennis promoted as nobody else ever had, met with Al Gore, otherwise known as Mr. Environment, at the White House. Yull made a discovery that may lead to techniques to neutralize radioactive waste, and he successfully demonstrated it numerous times, even to Department of Energy personnel armed with their Geiger Counters.[47] Gore is more of a politician than environmentalist, and it showed after his meeting with Brown: he declined further pursuit of Brown's technology, calling it too dangerous.[48] During the meeting with Gore, Brown mentioned that Dennis Lee was promoting him, and a Clinton staffer replied, "You had better hope that the President does not hear you say that."
We even had a prosecutorial misconduct hearing, undoubtedly one of the few in county history. Mr. Deputy eventually ascended to the hot seat, having amazing lapses of memory on the witness stand. His innumerable threats were conveniently recalled as warnings. In the affidavit used to justify increasing Dennis’s bail from $5,000 to $1,000,000, Mr. Deputy promoted his experience in investigating hundreds of cases with fraud elements in them. Mr. Deputy stated that the judge should heavily rely on his vast investigative experience in raising Dennis’s bail to $1,000,000. Mr. Big Time Attorney asked Mr. Deputy if he could recite the legal elements of fraud. Mr. Deputy could not recall them, replying that he did not commit such technical nuances to memory. Mr. Big Time Attorney then asked him to recall just one fraud element. Mr. Deputy was unable to.
Although the prosecution became the defense, their gutter maneuvers continued unabated. They filed a motion to have Dennis re-jailed that was the judge rejected with amusement. Mr. Researcher eventually returned from hiding and testified to what happened in his office during the raid. For months, Mr. Deputy was "too sick" to testify at the prosecutorial misconduct hearing. Mr. Big Time Attorney stated in court that Mr. Deputy spent those months not on his sick bed, but hiding in his house to avoid testifying. A District Attorney investigator replaced Mr. Deputy on the prosecution team and performed the "investigation" supporting the motion to have Dennis re-jailed. When Mr. Researcher returned from hiding, Dennis subpoenaed him. Mr. Researcher went to the courthouse to determine whether the subpoena was valid (it was not – it was an attempt by Dennis to talk with Mr. Researcher). Mr. Researcher was immediately sequestered by Ms. Prosecutor and questioned for hours. Mr. Investigator attended the interrogation session. After Mr. Big Time Attorney took the case, the judge was really his adversary. The judge put words in Ms. Prosecutor's mouth from time to time. She was along for the ride, following orders. Although the judge would not nakedly play kangaroo court judge, he still had to convict Dennis of something.
Mr. Researcher had conversations with Mr. Investigator during those months. While Mr. Deputy was "ill," Mr. Big Time Attorney drove from San Diego (an eight-hour round trip) for the hearings, to only be told that Mr. Deputy was too ill to testify. Requiring Mr. Big Time Attorney to spend days driving back and forth from San Diego apparently was designed to eat up Dennis’s legal funds. Mr. Investigator even admitted it to Mr. Researcher. During those delays, Mr. Investigator told Mr. Researcher that the judge would dismiss the case, no matter how much prosecutorial misconduct was discovered. Mr. Investigator then said, "The defense must be out a lot of money with all the delays. Lawyers coming all the way from San Diego cost a lot of money. Where are they getting the money to do this? What is Dennis going to do when his money runs out?"[49]
At one point, Mr. Researcher asked Mr. Investigator, "Has it ever occurred to you that Dennis Lee just might be innocent?" Mr. Investigator replied: "I could not care less if he is innocent. I am paid to get convictions." Mr. Researcher said that the prosecution's case appeared to be built on lies and deception, and Mr. Investigator said, "Sure we lie. Everybody lies. I lie however much is required to secure a conviction." Mr. Investigator was trying to disabuse Mr. Researcher of fairy-tale notions regarding the legal system, and was voicing opinions probably held by most American prosecutors, but only in Ventura would they say it aloud. Mr. Researcher has used Mr. Investigator’s words ever since in the courtroom when he has been summoned for jury duty. He is immediately dismissed when repeating Mr. Investigator’s words.[50]
Mr. Big Time Attorney became so disgusted by the continual underhanded maneuvers that he filed a suit in federal court on April 18, 1990 (two days after the prosecution filed their motion to have Dennis re-jailed, which was the last straw for Mr. Big Time Attorney), suit number 90-1942, suing the county officials for their criminal and unethical acts while prosecuting Dennis. For instance, during Mr. Big Time Attorney’s first day in court he told the judge that he could not yet legally defend Dennis in California, because the California Bar had yet to issue him his license. The DA's office immediately called the Bar, accusing Mr. Big Time Attorney of practicing without a license. His license was held up for months due to their interference. Ms. Prosecutor never gave Mr. Big Time Attorney a copy of her motions before the hearings, as was standard in the legal profession. Instead, he would be handed them as Ms. Prosecutor began arguing them in court. That was one of many gutter maneuvers.
Some crimes that Mr. Deputy and friends committed were identical to those committed by IRS agents while prosecuting Mr. Big Time Attorney’s client, and he gave the IRS a black eye in the U.S. Supreme Court over it. Mr. Big Time Attorney was expecting to destroy them in federal court, but the IRS's political muscle paled compared to whatever was behind Dennis’s prosecution. Mr. Big Time Attorney called a press conference when he filed the federal lawsuit, and had Dennis contact the Los Angeles media. The media organizations told Dennis that they would attend. Mr. Big Time Attorney boasted that the press always came to his press conferences. But nobody showed up. As Mr. Big Time Attorney sat with Dennis on the federal courthouse’s front steps in downtown Los Angeles, amazed that no media attended his press conference, across the street a camera crew for a Los Angeles TV station covered an event. Mr. Big Time Attorney crossed the street and introduced himself to the TV reporter. He said, "I don't know what you are covering here, but it can’t be as newsworthy as what is happening across the street. I am suing Ventura County legal officials for their gross violations of my client's civil rights…." The reporter surprisingly answered, "Yes sir, Mr. Big Time Attorney, I know who you are. I am aware that you called a press conference for today. I saw the invitation on my editor's desk and I asked if I could cover it, but I was assigned to cover the story that I am reporting on now. Your story looked far more interesting than this one, but I report on what I am told to. Sorry."[51]
One of Mr. Big Time Attorney’s rude awakenings was discovering how deeply ingrained the corruption was in California. Mr. Big Time Attorney had worked mainly in the Eastern federal courts. Gangsters run the West Coast’s federal courts, literally. Gary Wean regularly saw a member of Mick Cohen’s entourage who was aspiring young attorney. He has been a judge on the ninth district federal court for more than a generation. The man is nearly eighty-five years old and still sitting on the bench. Gary's book described the many criminal enterprises the man has engaged in, using the power of his position to swindle the public and others out of millions, if not billions, of dollars.
Mr. Big Time Attorney discovered how the land lay when they not only threw his case out of court, but also threatened to disbar him if he refiled it. Mr. Big Time Attorney thought he had seen it all, but Dennis’s case taught him some hard lessons about who really runs America. In the end, there was too much pressure bearing on Dennis’s case. The judge eventually held a legal gun against Mr. Big Time Attorney's head, essentially telling Dennis that he would bankrupt Mr. Big Time Attorney unless Dennis entered into a plea bargain.[52] Dennis pled guilty to not filing the form and paying the fifty dollars, but the deal was contingent on having the higher courts rule on the law’s constitutionality as it applied to his case. The day that Dennis pled guilty to not filing the form, the District Attorney himself came to the courtroom three times, and sat in the audience while Dennis affirmed his deal. The DA's presence was so startling that the courtroom's bailiff told Dennis, "I have been a bailiff here for eight years, and I had never seen the DA in person before today. Now he comes here three times today for your case. Who are you?" Mr. Skeptic stated that Dennis’s claims of being persecuted are a "delusion."
Dennis suspected it would happen, and the courts violated their deal, all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. They maneuvered strangely on Dennis’s case, all the way up the chain of appeals, and in late 1992, Dennis went to prison for more than a year for not filing a form. For his "violation" of a civil law and “mistakes” in his file, Dennis was put into prison with murderers. It may have been a parting shot from his friends in Ventura County.[53] Dennis was nearly murdered in prison, and the guards put him in that position. That he was even in that prison was incredible. Dennis was "lucky," and only had some fingers broken and teeth knocked out.
Dennis’s being in a medium security prison for an unintentional "violation" of a civil law was so bizarre that the Little Hoover Commission’s director showed up at Dennis’s prison unannounced, to interview Dennis.[54] After the director’s visit to the prison, Dennis was immediately transferred to a minimum-security prison where he served out his remaining term. Being railroaded into spending two years behind bars for "violating" a civil law was not the end. Dennis’s case set precedents and received special attention all the way. He did not get off parole until 1997. There were also irregularities with his parole, but he slipped through the net. Ventura County originally tried forcing Dennis to serve his parole in Ventura County, where he would have undoubtedly soon enjoyed Mr. Deputy's hospitality again, and they could have tried again to put him away for life. Dennis’s wife penetrated the bureaucracy however, and had his parole transferred to New Jersey, where she and her children had been living for years. That was how Dennis escaped California's clutches. He was on parole for years, and was suddenly and illegally put back on parole for another year after he was off it, when he began doing national speaking tours.
One last item is of interest. Within a few months of Dennis being hoodwinked by the judge into entering into a plea bargain that the courts did not honor, the judge suddenly retired and was subsequently promoted to a higher court. Ms. Prosecutor became a judge herself. Was it all for a job well done? How deeply it all went is anybody's guess.
In the May 1992 edition of PC World is an in-depth investigation published under the title: "SCAM! How a group of Los Angeles mail order companies ripped off consumers, distributors, banks, and publishers and why they're getting away with it." The article was illuminating.
In Ventura, Dennis was selling information kits by mail order and advertising nationally to do it. When people ordered the kits, we sent them. Nobody ever paid for their kit and got nothing, and if they felt their kit was not what they expected, we gave them 10 days to mail it back (at our expense) for a full refund, a commitment that we always honored. After the raid, we even gave everybody a chance to get their money back, and some took us up on it.
Below is the situation that PC World documented. A group of Los Angeles criminals set up mail order computer businesses where the consumer could mail-order a computer or accessories. They ran their ads in national computer magazines, alongside other vendor ads. Their prices were low, but not ridiculously so. The consumers then ordered the products by calling the number in the ad and paying by check or credit card. No product ever came. The company simply took the money and ran. The scam was taking place when Dennis sat in jail in Ventura, one county away. One office was a few miles from where Dennis was arrested.
The criminals would set up a facade corporation to take orders and money. When they had collected a few hundred thousand dollars from the duped consumers, they would shut down the company. A few months or weeks later, another company would spring up in LA and perform the same scam. PC World undertook an extensive investigation. PC World estimated that its readers were out $450,000 on responding to the scam's ads in PC World alone. PC World was being victimized itself, as the companies never even paid for their ads.
PC World was not the only group investigating the scam; other groups were also investigating, because many people were defrauded. Those criminals had been doing it for years. The investigations yielded their identities, and PC World’s article outlined the trail they traveled in setting up one phony company after another. It was all documented, down to the handwriting analysis of nineteen fictitious business statements filed by the conspirators, twelve in the same penmanship. They had no defense. Comparing their undeniable crimes to Dennis’s situation, one might think they would be put away for a long, long time. They were blatantly defrauding the consumer and making millions of dollars.
In a summary chart of what consumers can do about such scams, PC World published whom to contact if they have been defrauded, and listed the law enforcement agencies they contacted to try initiating prosecution. Not one law enforcement agency picked up the ball placed in their laps. The men were not being prosecuted by anybody. The excuses the law enforcement agencies gave for not prosecuting were interesting. The California Attorney General "punts to other agencies." The U.S. Postal Inspector's Office "pleads overwhelming case load." The LA City Attorney "rejects cases from individuals." The Federal Trade Commission "doesn't act on individual cases." The Secret Service (which actually does have jurisdiction in such a case) "puts lives of presidential candidates above your pocketbook." Most poignantly, the local police "can't afford to fly in out-of-state fraud victims to testify." In LA they could not afford it, but in Ventura they sure could.
This essay only hits the highlights and was perhaps the most emotionally difficult part of this site to write and edit. Names such as Mr. Professor and Mr. Researcher are used to protect people's privacy, and I am not into naming names, even “public servants” such as Mr. Deputy, who committed great crimes in his efforts to protect the energy racket. If it really matters to anybody, all those identities are easily discovered with a little research. I refer to many primary documents in my writings, particularly documents reproduced in Dennis’s books, which have plenty of names and dates in them. I wish nobody any harm, even the “bad guys.”
I moved to Ohio soon after Dennis entered into his plea-bargain. I staggered out of Ventura, realizing that whatever I was taught about the world did not remotely jibe with my experiences. I spent the next twelve years figuring it out, and this web site is the fruit of that investigation.
Dennis tried to rebuild his venture but his companies failed. I watched a number of attempts to steal his companies after the Ventura days.[55] I have mostly remained on the sidelines, this site being where I focused my efforts. Dennis is still at it, and can never be totally counted out of the game. Mr. Professor died in 2002, his life shortened by his involvement in my adventures. He never fully recovered from the complications of his diabetes that spun out of control during the Ventura nightmare (as with me, going bankrupt was a minor inconvenience when compared to the other dynamics). He reluctantly admitted that those events contributed to his health’s deterioration, which was a remarkable admission: he was the epitome of the strong, silent type, never complaining about anything.[56] I attended his funeral in North Dakota, and he was buried near his family’s farm. His widow told me that if she had not taken him to Mexico for treatment, his last ten years would have been spent in a wheelchair.
As his widow made her final goodbyes to his body at the funeral parlor, I sat in the viewing gallery, went into a meditative state and saw Mr. Professor in his heaven, which looked like a cross between North Dakota and Alaska (his favorite recreational venue). One day, I will visit his heaven and do the things that his health prevented us from doing, although it is never the same as doing it while alive. While I was meditating, I had a startling, unexpected vision that he seemed to send me. I related the vision to his widow, and she replied that I saw one of his favorite scenes while on earth (perhaps when he felt the most spiritual). That was some compensation, but the finality of watching his broken body being buried will always haunt me.
While I said goodbye to his body, a realization overcame me that I had never before suspected: the first time that voice spoke in my head, it was about a lot more than changing my career path; it was to meet Mr. Professor. The first time the voice radically changed my career path, and the second time it led me straight into Dennis’s company. I have had enough adventures for one lifetime, and that voice can find somebody else to perform such missions.
My mid-life crisis began in 2000, and centered on the idea that my life’s work was an exercise in futility. The terror attacks of September 11, 2001 initiated what apparently was my mid-life crisis’s final stage, which finished in 2007, only after I received professional help in the wake of another larger-than-life event coming to my front door. My mid-life crisis was the most sustained period of emotional agony that I ever experienced. That dawn after those dark years was a long time in coming. Growing old gracefully is my goal, now that my fiftieth birthday is behind me.
Seeing countless lives wrecked by the Big Boys as they play their “rule in hell” game, while “average people” have eagerly performed most of their dirty work, was a nightmare. I engaged in some activism after the USA invaded Iraq, but it was disappointing.[57] Finding people who can actively pursue free energy in today’s environment is virtually impossible.[58] I have gradually emerged from my seclusion, and appeared on a radio show in March 2008. I may do other shows, but for now I am attempting to initiate a conversation that might become fruitful.
I have been writing technical business documents since I resumed my career in 2003, and I may direct my improved writings skills toward editing my site, beginning with re-editing this essay in July 2008, but I am in no hurry.
Today, humanity stands on the abyss’s edge, but one man can only do so much, and I am slowly learning to relinquish my expectations and accept whatever lies ahead. I seek the quiet life, but the low-level activism that I may engage in could complicate matters.
I spent
a year as a Ventura law firm’s janitor when I was in college. I got the
job due to my friendship with the managing partner’s son. While there, I
heard conversations that made it clear how Los Angeles’s legal profession viewed
the hinterland of Ventura, and I saw behaviors at the law firm that, in retrospect,
were unprofessional. For instance, one graduate of that local mill worked
in Ventura County’s district attorney’s office before joining that law firm.
I regularly discarded research materials from the firm’s law library. That
was a normal part of law practices in the 1970s, long before the electronic age
appeared there. Even today, many lawyers continue to use paper reference
materials instead of electronic versions because the legal profession is a notorious
“late adopter” of technological advances. Sometimes the materials I discarded
were pages from permanent binders, where the updates would be new pages replacing
obsolete ones. Often, however, the obsolete materials were bound into books,
so the entire book would be discarded when the new one arrived. They could
be thick books with impressive titles such as “Tort Law” or “Uniform Commercial
Code.” The new attorney’s office was rather spartan, with a mostly empty
bookcase in it. He took me aside one day and asked me to save the more impressive-looking
books and fill his bookcase with them. Over the next several weeks, I did.
In a couple of months, his bookcase was filled with obsolete legal tomes – there
only to impress his clients. I eventually received my university education, ended up in the Big Eight
world of Los Angeles and today, in 2008, I work in a high-profile company in civilian
high-technology and deal with high-powered attorneys daily. Today, I laugh
at such a tactic, (similar to the “shelves filled with uncut books” observation
in The Great Gatsby), and it unwittingly gave me a preview of what I would
experience a decade later.
At that initial hearing, the judge began making the argument, after Mr. Big Time Attorney recited his busy federal court schedule, that if he was that busy then he could not defend Dennis, because the county needed a speedy trial in the interest of justice. Mr. Big Time Attorney replied that the Constitution guaranteed Dennis the attorney of his choice, and he was that attorney. When Mr. Deputy sat on the hot seat during the subsequent misconduct hearing, however, the judge saw no problem with having the hearings delayed for months due to Mr. Deputy’s “poor health.” Ms. Prosecutor’s assistant, Mr. Investigator, cheerfully noted that all the delays were undoubtedly draining Dennis’s defense fund. Mr. Investigator’s observation was accurate. Mr. Big Time Attorney’s retainer drained the last of my legal fund, and Mr. Professor further mortgaged his home and paid another $50,000 to Mr. Big Time Attorney, but those funds were rapidly dwindling. During the misconduct hearing, it became obvious that if the case was not dismissed due to prosecutorial misconduct, Mr. Big Time Attorney would need more money to continue defending Dennis, and only Mr. Professor’s pocket was deep enough. The misconduct hearing presented dramatic instances of misconduct, the most impressive being Mr. Researcher’s testimony. Dennis says that Mr. Researcher’s testimony turned the tide, as the judge turned beet red while observing Mr. Researcher’s testimony.
Mr. Big Time Attorney was Dennis’s third attorney, and Dennis agreed that if the case was not dismissed due to misconduct, then he would dismiss Mr. Big Time Attorney and represent himself at the trial. Dennis was his own attorney while in solitary confinement, and it would be immensely easier being his own attorney on the outside. Misconduct hearings were undoubtedly rare in Ventura County, and to have the case dismissed because of it, no matter how much evidence was presented, would have been surprising. At the misconduct hearing’s end, after Mr. Deputy’s amazing performance, the judge noted that there were lapses in the prosecutorial process, but not enough to dismiss the case, and Dennis would stand trail. Mr. Attorney then entered his motion to be dismissed from the case (actually, he entered it before the judge ruled on the misconduct findings, which strategically scuttled the case). Then the judge struck. He reminded Mr. Attorney that when he took the case a year earlier, he stated that he was Dennis’s attorney of choice, and Mr. Attorney would defend Dennis at trial, even if he did it for free. The judge took Mr. Attorney hostage and forced Dennis to capitulate. The judge used more than one stick to get Dennis to enter into a plea bargain. The judge also stated that he would rule on matters of law, while the jury would rule on matters of fact. In chambers, the judge said that Dennis was guilty of not filing the form and paying $50, which Dennis never denied. The judge than stated that if Dennis did not do a plea and the case went to trial, the judge would rule that Dennis was guilty by virtue of not filing that form and paying $50, and that he would see to it that Dennis was given the longest prison sentence that the judge could come up with, if he did not take the plea bargain. Given those options, Dennis then entered into a plea bargain. Mr. Attorney was so eager to have Dennis enter into a plea bargain that he promised to do all the appeal work for free. Predictably, the courts violated their end of the bargain, and Dennis ended up doing hard time with murderers.
During the plea bargain process, the judge recommended probation, but Dennis already had experience with the Ventura County Probation Department when making his bail appeals. The probation department wrote briefs that made the case that Dennis would jump a lowered bail and recommended that he be denied a bail reduction from its astronomical $750,000. Their briefs were filled with the same lies and “mistakes” that characterized the prosecution’s efforts. Dennis decided to take his chances with his appeal rights rather than submit his fate to a department that had already demonstrated its corruption. Dennis believed, almost certainly accurately, that if he consented to probation, the Probation Department would have quickly fabricated a “violation” of it, where he would have immediately enjoyed Mr. Deputy’s hospitality once again.
Medium security prisons are California’s most dangerous. At Dennis’s prison, the guards used the threat of going to Pelican Bay, the infamous maximum-security prison, to control the inmates. Murdering a fellow inmate only added two years to an inmate’s sentence, but if an inmate even talked back to a guard, it was a one-way ticket to Pelican Bay. All inmates feared that more than anything else. At Pelican Bay, solitary confinement is typical, although Dennis’s inmates heard that Pelican Bay guards would assign members of rival gangs to the same cell and form a betting pool on which inmate would murder the other. Dennis said that a dogcatcher had more risk than any guard in a California medium security prison.
Dennis's
first cellmate was convicted of multiple murders. He ran their prison yard,
but liked Dennis partly because he wrote books and was a businessman, so the other
inmates left Dennis alone, at least until the guards put Dennis in position to
be murdered. See Dennis Lee’s The Alternative, pp. 141-142.
As with Dennis’s county jail experience, he changed lives
while behind bars and kept in contact with his first inmate. Aspects of
prison social hierarchies are well known, and one relates to the inmate’s crime.
At the bottom are inmates who preyed upon the helpless, and child molesters rank
dead last. When Dennis’s first inmate was a week away from being released
on parole, he murdered a child-molester inmate. Perhaps he was more comfortable
being on the inside than the outside. Whatever the case may have been, murdering
that inmate merely added two years to his sentence.
The
second attempt was actually a few dozen attempts, but they
were similar. In 1996, Dennis mounted two national tours. During those
tours, Dennis promoted Yull Brown and his technology like nobody has before
or since. Brown was planning on transmuting radioactive material during
the tour’s final show, which was held in the arena where the Philadelphia 76-ers
played. Five thousand people attended that show. Brown was the main
attraction and, for the rest of his life, he continually replayed the video of
the standing ovation that he received. In the weeks before that show, more
than thirty of Dennis’s business associates called Yull to try enticing him away.
Yull politely recorded the names and phone numbers of those presenting their offers
and gave Dennis the list. Those are two of more than a dozen examples that
I could present of incompetent attempts to steal Dennis’s companies.
The scientific corollary to the most common and naïve response that that I receive to the idea of free energy is, “If free energy machines existed, I should be able to buy one and scientifically study it. Otherwise, I have no reason to believe that free energy machines exist.” When I have tried coaxing those scientists out of their armchairs and get them actually investigate the situation, I have never been successful. Their soft berths in academia and in corporate America have proven too comfortable. To believe that somebody is going to drop a free energy machine in your lap, so your testing lends them credibility, is to know absolutely nothing about how the real world of alternative energy works. The genuine technology is removed from circulation almost immediately.
In early 2006, after I published my free energy conundrum essay, I made attempts to engage various groups in discussion of the free energy issue. My attempts also triggered some sites to present parts of my work. My early 2006 experiences were so dismaying that some radical left writings and other sources finally became clear to me. My work does not dance around the free energy issue. My summary of the situation is direct and succinct, and I posted summaries of my work in forums where it had previously been discussed (in a deficient manner), and hoped to engage in some worthwhile discussion. The responses astounded me. I learned long ago that general public forums were not the place to discuss my work, so I have sought a few audiences that I hoped could engage in rational and honest discussion of the issues. My expectations were not high, as I have interacted with people for twenty years on the issue, and have encountered very few who truly understood. Forums devoted to suppressed technologies and sites devoted to free energy pioneers seemed to hold some promise. I could not have been more wrong. In early 2006, I made posts that briefly discussed my points and linked to places in my work that supported my contentions (as well as some private emails to people who were supposedly familiar with the milieu). The forum respondents completely ignored my writings and links, acting as if they were not there, and then regurgitated their physics textbooks to show why free energy was “impossible,” and even presented sites unrelated to the points I was making, presenting them as what I was arguing for. It was so bizarre that I had to reassess what I was seeing. It was tempting to think those respondents had low intelligence or were dishonest, but I think I was seeing something else. The respondents were able to write proper sentences and make somewhat coherent arguments and cite their textbooks, but their responses had nothing to do with my arguments and evidence, yet they acted as if they had rebutted and dismantled my work. As with that engineer who irrationally dismissed me as a conspiracy theorist, I believe I was seeing how the ego defends itself from information that threatens its delusions. They lashed out from deep-seated (and unconscious) fear, and I am sure those respondents thought they were being rational and even giving my work a fair hearing, even though they failed to acknowledged even reading it. Calling it denial I believe is too simple. I have come to expect those kinds of responses in general forums (which is why I no longer post to them), but was not expecting it in forums supposedly devoted to the issues I wrote about, not to the uniform degree I saw it. In one of the forums, there was not even one response that evidenced any consideration of my work. I have not contacted every potential group on earth, but there are only a couple left on my list that I think might have promise.
Ed
Herman has criticized
the writings of establishment pundits for many years, and has regularly shown
how they effortlessly perform logical summersaults to defend the indefensible acts of their rich and powerful
patrons, while trying to appear rational and ethical. Ed has written
that those pundits were incapable of acknowledging what was so obvious
to everybody else (because, I believe, the admission would expose how completely
they have sold their souls). I believe Ed was describing the same thing
I have seen for many years. Virtually nobody on earth today seems capable
of honestly and rationally engaging the free energy conundrum, but rationality and honesty appear
to have little to do with it, although defending egocentric delusions are not
acts of integrity. The free energy situation’s reality is simply too threatening
to people’s cherished fantasies of how the world works, and they will avoid the
implications at all costs. The vast majority simply stays in denial so complete
they will never become aware of the situation. I was able to understand
them and do not engage them. But it has taken me many years to finally understand
those who fancied they had open minds and even proclaimed familiarity with the
situation. They have what one friend has called “sophisticated egos.”
They pride themselves on being reasonable and ethical, but are incapable of being
reasonable and ethical when encountering information that threatens their illusions.
To say they are incapable of realizing how their world works might seem
to absolve them of responsibility, but if virtually nobody on earth is capable
of acknowledging the reality of the world they live in, the question then begs
to be asked: “Are humans really a sentient species?” And if we are, does
sentience mean much?
One libelous effort has been particularly notable. The critic is a scientist who writes about the free energy situation. He has a multi-faceted approach, much as I do. However, the author libeled Dennis in an essay written in 2001, claiming that Dennis has raised $100 million from his victims over the years. Being a scientist, one might think he would either qualify his “estimate” of what Dennis has raised (an “estimate” that I know is about an order of magnitude askew from reality) or tell the reader how he derived it, or even tell them that it is an estimate, but he presented his wild guess as a fact in an attempt to legitimize what the authorities did to Dennis in Seattle and Ventura. I considered the article another low integrity effort and ignored it. Apparently, because that scientist has some writing talent and experience in the field, that essay has been given to me at least a dozen times, in person and also by email, as the premier commentary on the free energy conundrum, and several times by people who should know better. In 2003, I was invited to join with others an effort to educate the public on the subject matter my work covers, but their free energy information was dominated by that scientist’s libel tract. I informed the editor that I could not publicly join an effort that libeled Dennis, and even spent days of my time informing the editor why that tract was libel, and my explanation sailed right over his head. That public effort prominently promotes that libel tract to this day, turning their efforts into disinformation rather than useful information. That scientist has also been informed about his libel and why it is libel. He has not seen fit to retract his libel, which only reinforced my opinion about his integrity level.
I
was invited into another educational effort around the same time. To my
dismay, I was also handed that scientist’s libel tract at one of the organization’s
meetings, as an example of excellent writing on the issue. That scientist
was subsequently invited into that organization’s inner circle, even to speak
at one of our organizational functions and perhaps even sell his technology through
our organization. When I brought up that man’s libel (when handed
his libel tract) and how he obviously did not have the right stuff to advance
the free energy effort, I doubt that anybody in that organization understood my
point. They thought that scientist could be “managed,” or that maybe he
owed Dennis an apology or that they needed to somehow comfort my emotional distress
or they had some other excuse. That organization had barely gotten off the
ground, and already it was aligning with people that I knew had low integrity
(that scientist was not Dennis’s only libeler close to the organization).
As a group, they did not really understand the integrity issue regarding the pursuit
of free energy. I then realized that our effort had little hope of success
and left the organization. That organization’s founder learned an integrity
lesson the hard way when those he invited into it kicked him out of the organization,
which was not the first time it happened to him. Without a large
nucleus of high integrity people, there is no point in even initiating a free
energy effort, unless learning harsh lessons and achieving martyrdom is the purpose.
Earth may not currently host enough of those high-integrity people to form that
nucleus, but if they do not exist in sufficient numbers, then pursuing free energy
is futile in today’s environment.
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