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Pedophile Roman Polanski with Hugh Hefner and ‘Playmates’. Polanski’s career was promoted by Cinema 16 like Kenneth Anger’s.
When I was doing research for my last post, I came across this snippet about the Playboy Club in Gus Russo’s The Outfit– Hugh Hefner’s “key club” opened on February 29th, 1960:
The Second City [Chicago] bosses wasted little time in sinking their claws in Hefner’s new “key club” venture…
Outfit [Chicago Mob] bosses were bestowed exclusive Number One Keys, which allowed them to date the otherwise off-limits “bunnies” and drink on a free tab. Slot king, and Humphreys crony, Eddie Vogel, dated “Bunny Mother” Peg Strak, who later became Roma’s executive secretary when Roma was promoted to operations manager of Playboy Clubs International, Inc., which oversaw the empire of sixty-three thousand international key holders. Although Hefner himself has never been tainted by his club’s unavoidable contact with the Outfit, it is interesting to note that in 1977, when he fought a copyright infringement lawsuit filed by Universal Studios, Hefner employed the services of Sidney Korshak. For a $50,000 fee, Korshak attempted in vain to settle the case with the studio, which was run by his old friend Lew Wasserman.
By 1973, the Playboy Empire was even more thoroughly entrenched in the mafia. In Alfred McCoy’s book The Politics of Heroin (1991), he mentions how Hefner’s name came up during an IRS investigation into a CIA front bank:
In 1973 agents of the Internal Revenue Service were able to photograph the Castle Bank’s customer list while a bank executive dined in a posh Key Biscayne restaurant with a woman described as an IRS “informant”. Reviewing the purloined documents, IRS investigators found that the 308 Castle Bank customers on the list had moved $250 million to foreign numbered accounts. Depositors included Playboy publisher Hugh Hefner, Penthouse magazine publisher Robert Guccione, and some major organized crime figures– Morris Dalitz, Morris Kleinman, and Samuel A. Tucker. Elated by the find, investigators formed Project Haven to make “the single biggest tax-evasion strike in IRS history.” Suddenly, the IRS announced that it was dropping the investigation because of “legal problems.” According to a later investigation by the Wall Street Journal, “pressure from the Central Intelligence Agency… caused the Justice Department to drop what could have been the biggest tax evasion case of all time.” The CIA invoked “national security” since it was using the Castle Bank “for the funding of clandestine operations against Cuba and for other covert intelligence operations directed at countries in Latin American and the Far East.”
The troika of mobsters listed above were originally from the East Coast but got in on Las Vegas’s gambling scene early. Morris ‘Moe’ Dalitz went into business with Meyer Lanksy to build the iconic Las Vegas Stardust casino; both Lansky and Dalitz had interests in Cuban casinos.
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Classy joint.
If you’ve read my previous post on The Rolling Stones and Meyer Lansky, you’ll notice that Hugh Hefner banks with mobsters who share business interests with the CIA’s mafia partners. These CIA and mafioso criminals started their cooperation in the early 1940s, when the OSS teamed with Meyer Lanksy and ‘Lucky’ Luciano to take over Italy. In 1973, the IRS stumbled onto the fact that Hugh Hefner ate at the same table as Mario Brod (CIA), Jimmy Rosselli (Mob), James Angleton (CIA), George Raft (Mob)… and probably the Rolling Stones’ young manager Andrew Loog Oldham.
Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Enterprises, like the other fronts which banked with Castle Bank & Trust of Nassau, is a CIA-sponsored business concern. Hugh Hefner is a CIA asset.
If the IRS’s discoveries and the mob connections are not enough to convince readers of Hugh Hefner’s patronage, I ask them to consider 1) when and how the Playboy Empire was founded 2) the nature of what Hefner does and 3) the company Hefner keeps.
Hugh Hefner In Context
Hugh Hefner is in a position to have compromising information on important people; it goes without saying that the ‘intelligence community’ is interested in collecting compromising information. In fact, it would be *remarkable* for someone in Hefner’s position not to have a working relationship with the CIA. It’s quite natural therefore that Hefner started his business the same year that the CIA began to use sex for *domestic* intelligence work on a large scale.
The Playboy Empire started in 1953 as a vehicle to publish pornography (its first spread featured Marilyn Monroe, that girl with a secret contract at Lookout Mountain Air Force Station). Also in 1953, CIA agent George White opened his first NYC prostitution-cum-doping den as part of the MK ULTRA program. A short time later White moved his operation to San Fransisco and his new (bugged) apartment became a training ground for CIA “carnal” operations.
What were these “carnal” operations like? In John Marks’ book Search for the Manchurian Candidate the author quotes nameless CIA agents on how they learned to use sex to get information; Marks says that CIA tactics exploited more than just the “missionary position”. CIA personality profiler John Gittinger, who was interested in self-centered sex for mass control purposes, was also part of George White’s San Fransisco operation.
Gittinger was interested in identifying tendencies toward self-centered sexual behavior, which includes masturbation and promiscuity, as part of his formula for controlling different personality types. The use of pornography for social control has been known since antiquity, but interest in it resurfaced again from American quarters in the 1950s. Playboy Enterprises bases its reputation on promiscuity and its business on masturbation aids.
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Playboy Mansion in Chicago– set up before the club!
Seven years after the CIA began learning how to videotape men with prostitutes, Hugh Hefner set up his first Playboy Mansion– that place with all the bedrooms where ‘successful’ bunnies participate in ritualized orgies. Note that the first Playboy Mansion manifested in Chicago, the original power base of CIA-Castro-assassination point man Johnny Rosselli. The Chicago Playboy Mansion was set up before Hefner opened his “key club”; it seems that bringing those special bedrooms online was more important than the commercial end of Playboy Enterprises. Perhaps Bill Cosby, the guy with nonconformist politics, understands why?
Image may be NSFW.
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Who Do Bunnies Do?
In the first excerpt above Gus Russo states that sixty-three thousand “keyholders” paid for access to the Playboy Club– a bar where they could watch suggestively dressed women. These men were sent secret decoder rings Playboy logo key chains, which they would flash at the ‘door bunnies’ for admission. These 63,000 “keyholders” were not allowed to touch the talent, however if patrons carried a “Number One Key”, they were. This is how ex-bunny Jan Marly Reesman describes the system to The Telegraph:
We were forbidden to date key-holders (club members), unless they were number-one key-holders, which meant they were celebrities or management. Then it was fine.
Patricia Cronin Marcello, in her book Gloria Steinem: A Biography, goes a little further explaining “Number One Keyholders”:
Number One Keyholders, who were corporation presidents, celebrities, important members of the press and other VIPs were afforded very special treatment. Not only were these men pampered inside the club, but also bunnies were permitted to give them their last names, to date them, and even to use the facilities of the club when in a Number One’s company.
Readers will remember that Gloria Steinem herself was a CIA asset. Her 1963 ‘exposé’ of the NYC Playboy Club was not hard-hitting journalism: the article was a self-flattering puff-piece. Steinem’s biggest gripe was that bunnies didn’t make as much money as they’d been led to believe. (You may find Steinem’s article to be a twisted sort of recommendation for the club, it seems that some of the aforementioned mobsters certainly did: a huge ad for the Stardust Casino in Las Vegas— Moe Dalitz and Meyer Lansky’s joint– graces the SECOND installment of Steinem’s article, which appeared one month after the first.) Steinem’s Playboy ‘exposé’ ignored the real story: why only foreign, linguist ‘bunnies’ were allowed to work in the VIP dinner lounges. Steinem also let a full list of “Number One Keyholders” slip through her fingers. Why?
Who were these “Number One Keyholders”? More than a few Civil Rights VIP’s hit Hefner’s Chicago mansion, including Jesse Jackson and Martin Luther King Jr., both of whom are known to have compromised themselves sexually. Steinem lobs stones at her journalistic competitors by naming other ‘dateable’ VIPs: Dorothy Kilgallen, Gwen Harrison, Maggie Daly, Hy Gardner, Frank Farrell and “television men” from Chicago and Miami, but emphatically not television men from New York! According to bunny Barbara Haigh, “I met all the stars – Jack Nicholson, Dustin Hoffman, John Wayne. Omar Sharif asked me to go out with him after work but I only had my civvies with me in the bunny room so turned him down…” You’ll remember Jack Nicholson, the character actor, because Roman Polanski used Jack’s house to drug and rape a 13 year-old girl in 1977– not unlike what Bill Cosby has recently been accused of doing in the Playboy Mansion!
The CIA probably collected useful sexual information on “Outfit Bosses” through Hefner and his partners like A. C. Spectorsky, who seems to have been be the brains behind Hefner’s magazine [1]. I’m sure that the Agency would never go into business without establishing dominance in the relationship.
According to ex-bunny Dr. Polly Matzinger, the VIPs which the Playboy Club attracted would have in turn been attractive to the CIA:
Every night the club was filled with movers and shakers. Listening to the conversations in there was fascinating. All of my friends were students, and we talked about everything we wanted to do when we ran the world.
But at night I was listening to the conversations of the people who really did run the world. Working at the club was an education.
It seems that Playboy bunnies were recruited based not only on their measurements, but on their ability to charm visiting foreign men of means, Dr. Polly continues:
I’ll never forget the questions on the application form: ‘What do you consider yourself an expert in?'; ‘What languages do you speak and at what level?’ The irony was that, in a world that wanted all women to be Betty Crocker, it was the Playboy club that wanted women who could speak to men as equals. [Which is why Dr. Polly was in a rabbit suit- a.nolen]
I quickly became a ‘pool bunny’, probably because I was educated and fluent in a few languages. Whereas regular bunnies are meant to facilitate conversation rather than talk themselves, pool bunnies – employed to play pool with club members – were meant to talk.
You had to know how to handle men and how to treat drunk people in a kind and subtle way.
Clik here to view.
From Gretchen Edgren’s history of the Playboy Club: “Playmate-Bunny Lynn Karrol, Miss December 1961, a spare-time aviatrix and sky-diving buff, elevates both herself and the decor at the New York Club.” When ‘great users of people’ are taking, they’re seen to be giving.
As gross as these Playboy Clubs were/are, I suspect that the real muck is shoveled in the Mansions. Ex-bunnies speak of a special orgy room, “The Grotto”, for high-profile Los Angeles Playboy Mansion guests where women are available 24-7. This is how Melanie Myers describes Hefner’s basement:
Myers said she often went to the Playboy Mansion with [Paige] Young and says the model often entered the infamous Playboy grotto, where orgies were said to prevail.
‘If you got invited to the Playboy Mansion and you didn’t go in to the grotto, your days were numbered, you’d get kicked.
‘I went two, three times to the mansion but got kicked because I wouldn’t enter the grotto.
‘One of the nights, I was up there with Paige, she was in the grotto that night.
‘When you’re in the grotto, this dingy, cave like place, it’s a sex free-for-all.
‘There were a lot of celebrities up there, celebrity men and young pretty girls.’
The emphasis is my own. These ‘grotto’ celebrities included the likes of Red Hot Chili Peppers musician Dave Navarro, but I suspect that a tour of Hefner’s basement is a right of passage for many American entertainers, i.e. people who are given microphones and need to be reliable.
It seems that bunnies make a point of doing people who are exceptionally valuable to exploit.
Hugh Hefner’s Political Friends
Finally, I’d like to draw readers’ attention to something which I stumbled onto a few days ago: In 1965 Ramparts editor Warren Hinckle approached Hefner to fund his glossy, expensive, ‘radical left’ magazine.
Clik here to view.
High production values to attract mainstream readers.
This is huge, and ultimately very ugly for Warren Hinckle, because much of his publication’s prestige rests on its being ‘persecuted’ by Angleton-types at the CIA. Mark Ames gives a *very establishment* summary of what was supposed to have gone down with Rampart’s ‘persecution’ in his article NSA Whistleblowers For Dummies Part II. I think the world is a little more complicated than Ames sees it.
Ramparts magazine started life as the baby of Edward Keating, a champion of angry Catholic, leftist politics and a fan of Hugh Hefner’s office decor (see Hinckle’s autobiography). However, Warren Hinckle, Dougald Stermer and Robert Scheer ended up taking over Ramparts and replacing the ‘Catholic’ bent with something they describe as ‘New Left’– the troika managed to wrest control of Ramparts by drumming up funders, one of which was Singer Sewing Machine heir Dick Russell.
Hinckle refrains from telling his readers if these funders ultimately included Hefner, though during their initial ‘pitch’ to Hefner, Hinckle and his cronies ended up staying at the mansion for a few days where they hobnobbed with ‘bunnies’, went skinny-dipping and ate oysters by the dozen. Although Scheer missed one meeting with Hef’s ‘head bunny’, Hinckle hints that approaching Hefner was successful, because he describes their approach after other successful attempts to woo millionaires who shared Hefner’s politics:
We began by infiltrating SNCC fund-raising parties at the homes of rich Westchester Jews. We pretended to be boosting the cause but kept looking over people’s shoulders to see the size of the checks they were writing.
I found there was left-wing gold rooted in pineapples, sewing machines, mattresses, zippers, plywood, soybeans, off-shore oil, General Motors and Hollywood– to name some pink fortunes– and we were soon deep into the concentric circles and interlocking directorates of the rich liberal-left. It was a very peculiar zoo.
(The ‘SNCC’ Hinckle refers to was probably the ‘Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee‘, which was led for a time by Stokely Carmichael, who became a leader of the Black Panthers– an African-American ‘hate group’– and a far-left martyr after 1971, when the FBI experienced leakage much like the CIA would do thanks to William Colby’s ‘Family Jewels’.)
Why would Hinckle be coy about confirming or denying money from Hefner? Hinckle wrote his autobiography in 1974, when the IRS investigation into Castle Bank and Hefner’s CIA connection was still fresh news.
Clik here to view.
Warren Hinckle in 2006 courtesy of Wikipedia.
I’ll remind readers that, according to Francis Stonor Saunders in The Cultural Cold War, liberal millionaires were the CIA’s favorite front for non-communist left funding. (Does it get any more non-communist left than Playboy Enterprises?!) Hinckle offers a candid explanation of why he needed so many millionaires to realize Ramparts:
Ramparts was itself a contradiction in its own terms– a big-money, left-wing, professional publishing operation… The left has never been accustomed to, let alone comfortable, operating in the crass commercial manner Ramparts represented…
The experiment I tried with Ramparts was an attempt to break out of the circulation boundaries and audience of fellow basket-weavers of the traditional liberal-left press… But an even more radical change from process color was the paper’s approach to the truth, which, on the left, had been practically synonymous with the correct “line”. I barred such theoretical essays from Ramparts and substituted old-fashioned muckraking journalism with its bias on the left but reporting facts… Ramparts developed a branch of new journalism that interpolated social and political critiques with trendy you-were-there stylisms.
Rampart’s tactics were the same as those used by the CIA and USAID with Zunzuneo in Cuba: report news and ‘fun’ entertainment items with an anti-Havana bias. Hinckle’s popular approach also smells like the ‘viral’ garbage which my old buddy Benny Johnson used to produce. Needless to say, Hinckle got the money he needed to make this expensive splash for as long as his magazine was useful: 1962 through August 1975, five months before Colby retired from the CIA.
Ramparts was useful for Colby, especially in taking down enemies like counterintelligence chief James Angleton. According to Ames, Ramparts’ ‘outing’ of Michigan State University’s role supporting the corrupt government in South Vietnam provided impetus for CIA programs like MH CHAOS:
The CIA was now on record committing serious crimes, violating its original 1947 charter that barred the CIA from operating on US soil or spying on US citizens. These and other crimes it would go on to commit would define the CIA’s and other officials’ pushback against whistleblowers and transparency in the coming years. In the meantime, the CIA went full-bore, digging into “Ramparts”’ and Hinckle’s financial records — looking for foreign, Communist sources. The CIA “urged” the FBI to investigate “Ramparts” and its editors as “a subversive unit.”…
Richard Ober was assigned to head up a new top-secret CIA domestic spying program code-named MH-CHAOS (“MH” for “worldwide operations” and “CHAOS” for “chaos”). Ober and 10 CIA officers set up a secret office in a secured underground vault in the basement of the CIA headquarters — protecting the operation from fellow CIA colleagues as well as outsiders. Intelligence reports on domestic political dissidents generated by this illegal program were shared with LBJ in his last year in power, and more vigorously with Nixon’s White House. Two presidents were active participants in a criminal program spying on and subverting political dissent. With MH-CHAOS, that program massively expanded. Two top CIA officials — counterintelligence chief James Jesus Angleton, and deputy director Thomas Karamessines, a dirty tricks expert who oversaw the campaign to overthrow Chilean President Allende — ordered Ober’s team to spy on and subvert the huge underground left-wing antiwar press that now dominated youth and campus culture.
Of course, Colby leaked MH CHAOS in 1974 as part of the Family Jewels; these leaks were designed to take out his rivals at the Agency. Ames may be giving Ramparts too much credit above, but the magazine was active in the strange outpouring of CIA leaks which began around 1966.
I’ll remind readers that CIA director William Colby’s ‘Family Jewels’ leaks were never honest leaks, they were carefully tailored to serve Colby’s political agenda and personal goals. The public didn’t get to see these ‘Family Jewels’ documents until 2007– so don’t hold your breath for Snowden’s.
My point in sharing this information on Ramparts is to show that everything about that magazine smelled like CIA managed opposition: from the magazine’s method of funding; to its glitzy ‘Congress for Cultural Freedom’-style marketing; to its message, which mimicked Bill Colby’s ‘milk of FDR’ thinking. Naturally, CIA head William Colby’s actions left Ramparts smelling like roses– even forty years later guys like Mark Ames are still woozy on the perfume. After the magazine’s dissolution, Ramparts editors went on to start operations like Mother Jones and David Obst’s incubator Rolling Stone. (David Obst was a close working ally of Sy Hersh and CIA director Colby.)
Hugh Hefner’s business dealings overlap with the CIA’s dealings and those of the CIA’s mafia buddies. Hugh Hefner’s porn empire is perfectly in tune with the CIA’s desire to collect compromising sexual information on useful people. Hugh Hefner is a go-to ‘pink’ millionaire for CIA-smelling managed opposition outfits like Warren Hinckle’s Ramparts. Let’s not forget that the OSS and CIA were set up by ‘pink’ millionaires, too.
Take home: A ‘Number One Key’ at the Playboy Empire is a booby prize!
Clik here to view.
Movers ‘n’ Shakers: He’s got just the room for you.
[1] A. C. Spectorsky will be the subject of upcoming posts, in the meantime, here’s a snippet from his TIME magazine obituary which someone kindly provided at askville.amazon.com:
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,878492,00.html
*********
Died. A.C. Spectorsky, 61, author and editor who created the more serious half of Playboy’s split personality; of a stroke; on St. Croix, Virgin Islands. Playboy Publisher Hugh Hefner’s tastes run to fried chicken, cool jazz and Los Angeles weekends; Auguste Comte Spectorsky preferred Continental cuisine, Mozart and Caribbean sailing. When “Spec” joined “Hef’s” three-year-old enterprise in 1956, it was a slick girlie magazine in search of some intellectual balance for the bare flesh. Spectorsky provided it by attracting contributions from top fiction writers and journalists. In the process he helped drive the magazine’s monthly circulation from nearly 800,000 to 6,500,000. Among his own books were The Book of the Sea (1954) and The Exurbanites (1955).
A. C. Spectorsky probably sourced British Security Coordination agent Roald Dahl’s work for the 1966 edition of Playboy. Wink wink, nudge nudge. Note that J. Paul Getty is on the cover too– Getty was a regular Playboy contributor and his money ultimately financed Ken Anger’s career.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Image may be NSFW.Clik here to view.
