There are no coincidences. I can attest to that. I am now a true believer that certain things were meant to be and others were not. And the ones that were not meant to be have made all the difference.

My dream of being a rock star journalist never came true. My time in investigative reporting was short. It wasn’t that I did not have stories of interest. It was, rather, that the stories were politically incorrect, I did not have a media champion to help me, and I had a mortgage to pay. I loved the work but I could not continue as I needed to make money and support my family. That was more than 30 years ago. Then, the story of my lifetime came unexpectedly. I doubt I could have handled it 30 years ago. Now, I am older and less naïve about the world. I can do this.

Now, more than ever, I am muttering to myself the words of Robert Frost: “And miles to go before I sleep.”

I hit the ground running when I read about the plight of Richard M. Taus, a Vietnam War hero and a former FBI agent who investigated many of the same things I worked on in the late 1980s and 1990s.

To quote another of my favorites and apply it to my experiences: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.” [Charles Dickens]

The Savings and Loan debacle and the Iran-Contra affair dominated the news back then. Incredible amounts of money seemingly disappeared from financial institutions and the testimony of Oliver North and Fawn Hall shocked like a cattle prod.

Somehow, the story of Richard Taus never came onto my radar. I did not live in New York where his story was taking place. I did not know about his arrest, conviction and sentence for horrific crimes that he swears he is innocent of. But now I know, and now I am on the adventure of my life seeking the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. And that truth might be awful yet liberating, so help me God!

Decades ago I was focused on the Colorado saga of Silverado Savings in Denver where the money was like mercury, moving quickly into seemingly intentionally soured real estate deals designed to fail. The Colorado characters I investigated were the local elite businessmen with flamboyant lifestyles. They and their beautifully dressed ladies dominated the society pages and then they became fodder for the reporters, as the son of the late George H. W. Bush played a significant role. But that was more than 30 years ago and life went on. Then, I received some preposterous information in 2017 that put me back into investigative addiction all over again.

Boxes of documents were found in a squash court at St. John’s Manor on the Isle of Jersey, Channel Islands. That is 350 boxes and more than 300,000 pages of juicy information implicating some famous and infamous people involved in some breathtaking financial maneuvers!

The boxes were found by Tanya Dick, the daughter of John W. Dick, one of the businessmen I had investigated. Tanya was a teenager during the Savings and Loan debacle and needed all the help she could get in being a history detective looking at paperwork from the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s and into 2000. I was hooked and pledged my help to Tanya and her husband Darrin Stock.

In going through my old notes, I decided to search the internet for new clues. That is when I came across the case of Richard M. Taus, an FBI agent who found absolute proof of violations of the Boland Amendment which prohibited the federal government from providing military support designed to overthrow the government of Nicaragua, specifically to prevent the CIA funding of the Contra rebels.

I used my pal Google and another one called DuckDuckGo to return to the 1980s when Taus was working as an FBI agent in both organized crime and foreign counter-intelligence.

I read and read and drank lots of coffee. Taus looked into much of what I looked into years ago. But I was just a curious citizen with very limited resources. Taus was on his quest as a dedicated federal agent looking into mob money, drug money and the spending of it for weapons for the Iran-Contra effort. He also found that some of the billions lost in the savings institutions also found their way into the coffers of Iran-Contra. That really startled me as I shared that theory with many of the journalists I was working with so many years ago. We all saw it but could not prove it beyond the shadow of a doubt and none of the major media would support our hunches.

I also learned that Taus was a close friend of the late William Sullivan, Assistant Director of the FBI from the J. Edgar Hoover era. I remembered Sullivan as I knew him when I worked at the FBI in 1969-1970. It was my first job out of college and I saw Sullivan in the corridors of the Department of Justice. He was a friendly face and greeted me warmly. He liked the articles I wrote for The Investigator Magazine. Though helping to spearhead the FBI’s war against liberals under COINTELPRO, Sullivan later stood up to Hoover and had some personal integrity (he died under suspicious circumstances before he was to testify before the 1977 House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA).

When I learned that Taus was convicted of sexually abusing boys on the soccer team he was coaching, I was horrified. How could a friend of Sullivan do something like this? I dug deeper. I called the Clinton Correctional Facility in Dannemora, New York, and spoke with Taus’s prison counselor.

I learned that Taus was a model prisoner who used his background to help other inmates in their legal proceedings, helped put the prison law library together and organized charity efforts for those in need. He never wavered in his over 32 years of incarceration that he was framed with false evidence, silencing him for what he had found out. I learned that I could email Taus and also speak to him by telephone.

All correspondence is monitored by prison staff and I was told to be careful with what I wrote. I proceeded with caution, explained my background and then told Taus that I was re-examining allegations from 30 years ago that several trust accounts in St. Helier, Isle of Jersey, were used to launder millions of defaulted savings and loan money. Taus knew what I was talking about. We discussed the failures of Silverado Savings in Colorado, Hill Financial in Pennsylvania, and Lincoln Savings in California. I mentioned the Compendium Trust, Barclays Bank, Sandsend Financial and the names, dates and locations where they intersected.

This incarcerated prisoner delved back in time, used his memory and pointed me to lawsuits, memoranda and his own personal investigations. The match-up to what is in the Jersey boxes is eye-opening as to how financial puppet masters perform, getting away with it over and over again. The fact that Taus knew all about it indicated to me that he was doing his job back then and rocked the boat of those wanting to keep the financial secrets.

I asked myself, “What could Taus have uncovered that was so sensitive to his own agency, the CIA and the Reagan White House?” My strong belief is that he knew enough to blow the Iran-Contra affair all the way to the White House, CIA Headquarters in Langley and the FBI Director at the Department of Justice.

Taus knew then, as he knows now, how his own fellow FBI agents, the CIA and Nassau County law enforcement worked together to discredit him, silence him and present him to the world as a pedophile. I have watched enough movies and read enough novels to know that sexual blackmail is very effective. It is an old ploy that never disappoints. But in the United States, a defendant is supposedly innocent until proven guilty. A defendant is guaranteed a fair trial. Did Taus get one? I think not.

I delved deeper into Taus’s arrest and trial. I spoke with his attorneys and learned of the outrageous violations that included jury misconduct, prosecutorial misconduct, coercion of the alleged victims and their parents, the total lack of physical evidence, and the withholding of evidence favoring the defendant.

I dug deep and examined what Taus was working on and who his superiors were. His refusal to sign the document that federal agents must sign that says they know of no wrongdoing within their ranks is in my opinion why he was silenced and falsely shamed as a pedophile.

Taus simply knew too much and would not shut up about it. He found the CIA working domestically in Freeport, New York, with known Contras from Central America. Taus personally witnessed Oliver North handing a package to Contra leader Adolfo Calero at the Fort Lauderdale Airport. It was his job to report these crimes and he did. He was told to leave it alone and move on to other cases. He didn’t. He kept reporting his findings.

This was not acceptable to Taus’s supervisors, who included Special Agent Lindley DeVecchio, Special Agent Patrick Groves and, ultimately, Assistant FBI Director Oliver “Buck” Revell.

Did Revell give the order to do whatever was necessary to discredit Taus? Let’s look at the facts, like Jack Webb in Dragnet!

The behavior of the Nassau County District Attorney’s office, coupled with the behavior of Nassau County Sex Crimes Detective Lloyd Doppman, is shocking and reprehensible. District Attorney Denis Dillon withheld the fact that he was related to juror Nancy Dillon. The lead prosecutor J. Kenneth Littman was himself a predator of teens and resigned in disgrace following Taus’s conviction. Presiding Judge Edward Baker was an alcoholic and also resigned shortly after Taus’s conviction.

Doppman used his patrol car to interrogate the alleged child victims and to pressure them to change their stories. Many were from broken homes and unable to read and write. Doppman wrote false statements for them to sign.

The jury was so polluted that juror Carolyn Lewis went to defense attorney Anthony Lombardino and told how Nancy Dillon bragged that she was indeed a relative of DA Denis Dillon and had lied during voir dire. Nancy Dillon also told how she was in the same karate class as Detective Lloyd Doppman. The jury foreman was a former air traffic controller who was fired by Reagan and hated the FBI. Juror Lewis also told that newspapers were delivered to the jury room daily that had prejudicial stories of how an FBI agent sodomized the children on the soccer team he was coaching. This daily delivery of newspapers was in direct violation of the judge’s instructions. Another juror was a school teacher in Freeport, New York, where all teachers, parents and school administrators were given inflammatory flyers depicting Taus as a child predator.

The defense attorneys asked for a mistrial 23 times. Evidence was withheld by the FBI that would have demonstrated to the jury the findings of corruption that Taus found. Did our own FBI, CIA and White House invoke the old standby, “National Security?” What was so damning to our government that interviews and files were withheld and repeated requests by the defense were ignored?

Richard Taus was granted parole. Weeks before he was to be released, he was pushed down a flight of concrete stairs and broke his hip and his leg, nearly bleeding to death before he was taken to the hospital. His release came six months later. Taus is now living in the Jamaica section of Queens, New York, with his son whom he adopted as an orphan in Vietnam.

This is a story for the movies. It is all real. It has the elements of drama, scandal, heartbreak and politics at its very worst.

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