The Heiresses and the Cult - Bronfman Twinz

[Niggasaki]

From Vanity Fair:

The Heiresses and the Cult

To family friends, Seagram heiresses Sara and Clare Bronfman are victims of a frightening, secretive "cult" called nxivm, which has swallowed as much as $150 million of their fortune. But the organization's leader, Keith Raniere, seems also to have tapped into a complex emotional rift between the sisters and their father, billionaire philanthropist Edgar Bronfman Sr. The author investigates the accusations that are now flying—blackmail, perjury, forgery—in a many-sided legal war.

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http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/featu ... man-201011


I thought this article was perfect for TIU

[CrackSmokeRepublican]

Interesting article... makes me wonder if there is a "fortune" to be made in "Talmudic"-"Jew Money Scams"   .... via Jew Child "Deprogramming"  :think:

[maz]

Secret Agent Schmuck
by Chris Thompson
October 16, 2007

It was a morning a little more than a year ago: A dapper, gray-haired gentleman was discussing his recently published novel with the two hosts of Fox & Friends, the morning show on the Fox News Channel. Anchors Tiki Barber and Kiran Chetry appeared enthralled by the author, Juval Aviv, who said that his book was actually a barely disguised account of the life and alleged 1991 murder of millionaire media tycoon Robert Maxwell.

Aviv provided his bona fides: He runs a Madison Avenue corporate-espionage firm named Interfor and had been hired to investigate some aspects of Maxwell's complex finances. But during his investigation, Aviv had discovered explosive truths. Maxwell, Aviv said, had actually been a spy for the Russian, British, and Israeli intelligence agencies, and had paid with his life when his spymasters discovered that he'd double-crossed them. Aviv claimed to his Fox News hosts that the revelations in his book were so stunning that he'd had to novelize the tale to protect himself. If he'd told the actual truth, he hinted, he'd have been killed.

"I couldn't write it as a nonfiction," said the Israeli man in his accented English. "It had to be fiction. I don't think I would have survived the nonfiction version of it."

Barber and his co-anchor looked duly impressed. And why not? Here was the real deal, a former Israeli spy who had reportedly spent the 1970s hunting Palestinian radicals around Europe and the Middle East, whose life story was so terrible that he could only allude to it. "You were a top assassin for Mossad, which is Israel's secret service," said Chetry. "In your book, the main character has a situation where he's supposed to knock off 12 leading terrorists and kill them."

"Yes," Aviv said.

"How realistic is that?"

"It's very realistic." Laughing modestly, he added: "I can't talk about it."

It was just another day in the life of Juval Aviv, an "international security expert" and post-9/11 media celebrity who has parlayed his mysterious past into countless appearances on local and national television. Most famously, Aviv has promoted the idea that he was the lead Mossad assassin tasked with avenging the 1972 massacre of Israeli Olympic athletes in a secret operation that was portrayed in Steven Spielberg's 2005 film  Munich. It was Aviv that actor Eric Bana was supposedly playing, though his name in the movie was "Avner."

At least that's what Aviv wants people to believe.

"This guy's full of shit," says Larry Johnson, who served in the CIA and as a deputy director in the State Department's Office of Counterterrorism. "What's true is, yes, he has a security and corporate-intelligence firm, and he's big at playing up the Israeli mystique. If you say it with a foreign accent, you're good to go."

Aviv, these senior counterterrorism officials insist, is no terrorism expert; instead, he's a liar who's been spreading falsehoods about his résumé and his prowess as an investigator.
But even Aviv's most virulent critics express astonishment at what he's been accused of doing lately.

Court documents allege that in 2003, Aviv signed an intelligence contract with the NXIVM Corporation, an Albany-based company that offers seminars in achieving personal and business goals, and whose devotees include heirs to some of the richest fortunes in America and Mexico. In the last few years, former members of NXIVM have come forward to claim that the company is in fact a predatory personal-growth cult that subjects its members to intensive brainwashing and requires them to swear their lives to its leader, an accused pyramid-scheme operator and self-styled genius named Keith Raniere. According to court papers, NXIVM hired Aviv to dig up dirt on someone that Raniere considered an enemy: New Jersey–based cult expert Rick Ross, a controversial figure himself who is also a frequent guest on television news programs.

Ross had been working with people who wanted his help to get family members out of NXIVM, and had been posting damaging news stories about Raniere on his website.

Ross is now suing NXIVM and Aviv, claiming that over the course of several months, Aviv and Interfor compiled an extensive report on him that included private financial and telephone records—information that Ross says was illegally obtained. Ross complains that he was even the target of an elaborate sting operation orchestrated by Aviv on behalf of NXIVM, which involved trying to lure him onto a ship in the Caribbean.

NXIVM and Raniere have denied the allegations and are suing Ross as well, charging him with copyright infringement, misappropriation of trade secrets, and product disparagement. But the Voice has learned that Aviv has done other work for Raniere, an odd figure who requires his followers to refer to him as "Vanguard." The Voice has obtained evidence that Aviv agreed to investigate Raniere's ex-girlfriend, a woman who says she has been systematically harassed, intimidated, and terrorized by members of NXIVM.

Juval Aviv: trusted Fox News terrorism expert, or a fraudulent tale teller willing to hire himself out to a thuggish cult leader? It's a question that is at the heart of three lawsuits in two jurisdictions, with as many twists and turns as an espionage potboiler.

The U.S. Attorney's office charged that, in 1991, General Electric had hired Aviv to submit a report on the security of Caribbean vacation sites that G.E. employees planned to visit, and that Aviv falsely claimed to have interviewed five government officials and one FBI agent for his report.

However, it was a weak accusation: Aviv was paid only $20,683 for the job, G.E. officials had never complained about his work earlier, and, during the trial, Aviv was able to produce telephone records to refute the main charge. His attorney, Gerald Shargel, argued in court (rather convincingly) that the case was really about the government's lingering anger over Aviv's involvement in the Pan Am matter.

"It is an obvious vendetta," Shargel wrote in response to the indictment, "with agents and prosecutors determined to dig and dig into Mr. Aviv's past at whatever expense, and to manipulate and contrive until they can formulate a theory of criminal liability that can be used to discredit Mr. Aviv here and abroad. It is by discrediting him that the government hopes to stamp out the vexatious and powerful public concern over its distasteful involvement in the Lockerbie affair." The jury agreed and acquitted Aviv of all charges.

And so Aviv was free to rebuild his reputation—a surprisingly easy task, thanks to 9/11, his reputed Mossad history, and the short attention span of television producers. To be fair, Aviv's reputation as an expert in asset recovery and researching overseas accounts has never been disputed. In addition to his novel about Robert Maxwell, he has also written two books on how to protect one's home, family, and business against terrorist attacks and "minimize your exposure to the next catastrophe." But given his taste for the clandestine, it was perhaps inevitable that controversial, even allegedly sinister figures would crave his services. In October 2003, the leaders of NXIVM Corporation sought him out.

It had been a tough month for NXIVM. The Albany Times-Union had been running stories all year detailing the company's compulsive secrecy, its members' dazed expressions, the exorbitant fees for its 10-hour-long self-help "seminars," and the demand that initiates bow whenever leader Keith Raniere walked into the room. A lengthy
Forbes article depicting NXIVM as a strange, manipulative cult was about to go to press. And the family of Kristin Snyder, who had allegedly committed suicide after fleeing one of NXIVM's 16-day "intensive" courses, was starting to raise a fuss. According to Joseph O'Hara, a local attorney who worked as a liaison between NXIVM and Aviv, Interfor was initially hired to investigate the circumstances surrounding Snyder's death.

The  Times-Union account of Snyder's last few weeks described a vivacious, confident farm girl whose personality quickly disintegrated after she attended her first 16-day NXIVM session. Her family claimed that she had become an angry, moody insomniac. Snyder told her family that she'd recently learned she had been sexually abused as a child, and that she was morally responsible for the destruction of the  Columbia space shuttle. In February 2003, while attending another NXIVM seminar in Alaska, Snyder vanished without a trace; authorities concluded that she paddled a kayak into the middle of a freezing lake and then capsized it.

When police discovered Snyder's truck, they found a notebook inside. "I attended a course called Executive Success Programs (a.k.a. Nexium)," Snyder wrote. "I was brainwashed and my emotional center of the brain was killed/turned off. I still have feeling in my external skin, but my internal organs are rotting."

According to the accounts by Forbes and newspapers around Albany, NXIVM was founded by Keith Raniere, a self-proclaimed genius who, at 12, allegedly took less than a day to teach himself high-school math. While working as a computer programmer in the late 1980s, Raniere became a devotee of Ayn Rand and soon was convinced that self-interest was the apogee of ethical behavior. Setting up a company called Consumer Buyline, he allegedly hawked memberships in a nonexistent discount-consumer-goods club, wowed crowds with his extraordinary charisma, and promised lucrative commissions for members who recruited more customers into the group. But in 1993, as the company's bills began to stack up, the New York attorney general filed suit, charging that Consumer Byline was just another pyramid scheme designed to sucker membership fees out of unwitting customers. As 24 other attorneys general began investigating the company, Raniere shut it down and agreed to pay $40,000 to make the lawsuit disappear.

Asked about the attorney general's charges, NXIVM spokesman Phil Robertson noted that Raniere had never admitted any wrongdoing, and also that he suspected the whole investigation was a conspiracy engineered by Wal-Mart, which felt threatened by Consumer Buyline's low discount prices. "It's just a brilliant idea to save people money, and I think the pinch was felt in Arkansas, and Wal-Mart felt the pinch, and they said, 'Let's collapse this guy.' "

Raniere has done considerably better with NXIVM. Originally dubbed Executive Success Programs, the company offers Ayn Rand–ian seminars on personal growth and achieving business goals. But critics say that the exhaustive, 10-hour sessions are designed to break down students' personalities and isolate them from family and friends, until they're dependent on NXIVM for their self-esteem and willing to pay good money to get it. NXIVM devotees include some of the richest people in America and Mexico, such as two heirs to the Bronfman/Seagram's fortune, Black Entertainment Television co-founder Sheila Johnson, and the children of former Mexican presidents Carlos Salinas and Vicente Fox.

cont

[maz]

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Women killed in Mexican cartel murders had alleged ties to sex cult Nxivm

The nine women and children slaughtered in Mexico on Monday were part of a Mormon community with ties to the alleged sex-cult Nxivm.

The outpost Mormon community in Mexico is where underlings of Nxivm leader Keith Raniere recruited young women to work as nannies in an upstate New York compound run by the accused cult — suggesting at least in part that the jobs would get the girls away from their home region's drug violence, according a man hired by Raniere to produce a documentary about the group.

The three moms and six kids killed in Monday's violence in the northern town of Sonora are believed to have been the victims of a drug cartel, which may have mistaken the group's caravan of three SUVs for rivals, Mexican authorities said Tuesday.

The filmmaker working with Raniere at the time, Mark Vicente, told the online magazine Slate  that the documentary ultimately became a recruiting video for Nxivm, which purported to be a self-help group but morphed into what the feds called a cult that sexually, physically and emotionally abused its mainly female followers.

The film included an interview with Julian LeBaron, who identified himself as the cousin of one of the moms killed Monday and who is a leader of the Mexico Mormon community.  LeBaron's brother was kidnapped by a local drug cartel in 2009, and the family defiantly refused to pay a ransom. The cartel eventually released the abducted man.

I am not sure if I buy this story.

[maz]

Seagram heiress Clare Bronfman is jailed for seven years and ordered to pay $500,000 fine for bankrolling Keith Raniere's NXIVM sex cult via Hide Out Now

Seagram's liquor fortune heir Clare Bronfman, who is accused of using her family fortune to bankroll the NXIVM cult, has been sentenced to almost seven years in prison and ordered to pay a $500,000 fine for her role in the branded sex slave case.

Bronfman, the daughter of the late billionaire philanthropist and former Seagram chairman Edgar Bronfman Sr., was sentenced to a total of 81 months on Wednesday at the US District Court in Brooklyn.

The 41-year-old is the first member of the notorious NXIVM group, led by disgraced founder Keith Raniere, to be sentenced.

Bronfman pleaded guilty last year to charges she committed credit card fraud on behalf of Raniere and to knowingly harboring a Mexican woman brought to the US on a fake work visa in order to obtain that woman's labor for herself.

In addition to prison time, Bronfman will also pay a $500,000 fine and $96,605 in restitution to the Mexican woman she recruited.

Raniere, the disgraced leader of the self-improvement group in upstate New York, was convicted last year of turning women into sex slaves who were branded with his initials.

His adherents included Bronfman, actress Allison Mack of TV's Smallville; and a daughter of TV star Catherine Oxenberg of Dynasty fame.

Bronfman's lawyers had asked a judge to give her three years' probation instead of prison time but prosecutors had argued she deserved at least five years behind bars.

Bronfman watched on silently on Wednesday as nine women gave victim impact statements before her sentence was handed down and described how their lives had been destroyed by her and NXIVM.

One former member had said she watched Bronfman mentally descend over the years into a 'dangerous megalomaniac'.

Another slammed her as a predator, saying: 'You should feel shame, self loathing... You should understand there are lives you destroyed'.

'I pray that you will take the claws of Keith Raniere out of you, and you will learn who Clare Bronfman really is.'

Prosecutors say Bronfman recruited individuals into NXIVM-affiliated organizations and then sought to obtain visas or other immigration status for them based on false promises.

In regards to Jane Doe 12, Bronfman submitted documents to secure a work visa that would see the Mexican woman paid $3,600 per month. Prosecutors say, however, that Bronfman only paid the woman about $4,000 over a year-long period for her work.

In a letter to the court just last month, Bronfman wrote that she 'never meant to hurt anyone, however I have and for this I am deeply sorry'.

Still, she said that she couldn't disavow Raniere, who is due to be sentenced next month, because 'NXIVM and Keith greatly changed my life for the better'.

During Raniere's trial last year, prosecutors told jurors that NXIVM operated like a cult.

To honor Raniere, the group formed a secret sorority called DOS that was comprised of brainwashed female 'slaves' who were branded with his initials and forced to have sex with him, prosecutors said.

Bronfman denied being a member of the secret women's sorority but prosecutors argued that Raniere and NXIVM wouldn't have been so powerful without her financial support.

She has long been affiliated with NXIVM and gave away tens of million of dollars to bankroll Raniere and his program of intense self-improvement classes.

She also paid for lawyers to defend the group against lawsuits brought by its critics.

Keith Raniere, the disgraced leader of the self-improvement group in upstate New York, was convicted last year of turning women into sex slaves who were branded with his initials

Prosecutors say the secret society was comprised of brainwashed female 'slaves' who were branded with his initials and forced to have sex with him.