Clint Eastwood, Angelina Jolie, "Freeway" Rick Ross and L.A.'s Dark Alliances

Clint Eastwood, Angelina Jolie and the 1930’s  L.A. Kidnapping Crisis

by Barney B.  Bariscale, CPW News Service

     Being John Malkovich means playing some juicy roles…none juicer than that of Rev. Gustav Arminius Briegleb in the film, The Changeling.    Briegleb came to the aide of Walter Collin’s mother, the kidnapped Los Angeles boy murdered in what was known as the “Chicken Coop Murders” in Wineville, California by Gordon Steward Northcott.  Clint Eastwood directed the true story of the Wineville murders with Angelina Jolie playing the part of Walter Collin's grieving mother.

    Eastwood’s film rightly explains that Wineville changed its name to Mira Loma, California to escape its tragic past.  Mira Loma:  “Sight Knoll” or “it watches hill”….suggesting a new vantage point.  Eastwood’s film leaves out, however, many other important facts in the Walter Collins case that obstruct our full view of the California culture.

    It was widely rumored that Gordon Steward Northcott was providing his kidnapped boys to a powerful underworld of pedophile personalities.  In light of the Jerry Sandusky case in Happy Valley, Pennsylvania and the Franklin Cover-Up in Omaha, Nebraska, these claims could have easily been investigated using survivors’ testimony.   No mention of these connections are voiced in the Eastwood film.

     Rev. Gustav Briegleb, was a graduate of Yale University whose career path took him to Baltimore, Maryland, home to the rich and powerful progenitor of Brown Brothers Harriman, Alexander Brown.  It also took him to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania where decades later in the summer of 2011 over 30 pedophile priests were removed from Roman Catholic parishes just months before the Jerry Sandusky  scandal broke at Penn State.   Rev. Briegleb was installed in the Holland Memorial Church on January 17, 1916.  The Sandusky scandal broke between the Penn State and Nebraska football game in 2011 leading many to speculate about the long standing cover-up and Coach Joe Paterno’s relationship to Sandusky and the Republican National Committee.  In 1988 in New Orleans at the Republican National Convention that nominated GHWB, Coach Joe appeared with convicted pedophile and S&L swindler, Omaha’s Lawrence E. King of Lincoln Savings.  Paterno gave a speech.  King sang the National Anthem.  This Omaha and Pennsylvania connection turned heads in a state, Pennsylvania, where names like Dick Thornburg, Tom Ridge and Frank Carlucci were Republican stalwarts.   King was implicated, not unlike Jerry Sandusky, in what appeared to be a wide ranging power elite pedophile ring that had a California connection through the witness of victim Johnny Bonacci who sued King for $1 million and won in what should have rightly been held after a criminal trial like the one that  the L.A. establishment was trying to cover up in the Walter Collins case.

    Information about Rev. Gustav Briegleb is hard to find, but some helpful insights come from Ross Briegleb (from Briegleb’s  Aerodome: El Mirage and Briegleb History, http://www.rbriegleb.com/about/) who writes:

     After one year he went to New Haven, Conn., attending Yale Divinity School, presiding in a small suburban church.  Charges in Tuckahoe and Syracuse, N.Y. followed.

     Young Mr. Briegleb had the desire to become identified with the Presbyterian Church of Baltimore, Md.,being received into the Presbytery of Baltimore in 1911.  The young preacher did an outstanding piece of work there, making extensive improvements in the structure, pacing this congregation upon a faith basis by their tithes and paying off the mortgage. Holland Memorial Presbyterian in Philadelphia sought him and here he served during the years 1916 and 1917, then came the call to California.

     A unique glider airplane is featured in Ross Briegleb’s website because Gus Briegleb, son of the famous pastor, built a glider in the basement of St. Paul’s Presbyterian Church.  Also featured on Ross Briegleb’s website is a photo of Walter Briegleb, a World War German flying “Ace” who according to Jerry Scutts’s German Night Fighter Aces of World War II, had over 25 Allied kills (Jerry Scutts, German Night Fighter Aces of World War II, Oxford: Osprey Publishers, 1998, p. 94).

     Jim Pomeroy recounted his memories of actor Steve McQueen from the 1970’s.  “I rode with him a couple of other times in the desert with Roger Ridell. We would go out to El Mirage, which was east of Palmdale where there was a 10-mile dry lake and big sand hills to ride up and down on. Roger was one of the people who helped make the movie On Any Sunday with Bruce Brown.” (http://www.soloshawn.com/riding-with-steve-mcqueen.html)

     Bruce Brown is the documentary film maker from Nicole Brown Simpson’s home of Dana Point, California, who made the widely popular surfing film The Endless Summer.     Dana Point is named for Cambridge, Massachusetts’, Richard Henry Dana, author of Two Years Before the Mast.

    The LA Time’s Charles Hillinger recounted El Mirage’s history with Rev. Gustav Briegleb:  “EL MIRAGE, Calif. — This is the closest man can come to being a bird," shouted 78-year-old Gus Briegleb as he caught the whirling dust devil and soared skyward at 500 feet per minute.... For 63 years, Briegleb has been catching thermals--rising columns of spinning hot air, miniature tornadoes, dust devils at ground level--and riding wavelike air currents bouncing off mountains...He built his first glider in 1928 in the basement of St. Paul's Presbyterian Church in Los Angeles, where his father was pastor. It has been his passion ever since.

     When Steve McQueen returned to an airplane hangar after his diagnosis of cancer and began a type of spiritual quest, he appeared to be returning to something he had known.  The glider scene from The Thomas Crown Affair, would have been common place at El Mirage.  Ross Briegleb writes:

     To begin with, the reader will learn about some of my ancestors, most noteworthy, my Grandfather, Gustav Arminius Briegleb (GAB), my father William Gustave Briegleb (Gus) my mother Annie Briegleb, and brother Ken. The narrative will then follow my family’s journey from Van Nuys, California to the Mojave Desert where my Dad purchased from the War Assets Administration an ex army airfield known as Mirage Field Auxiliary #3.

 

     Gustav Arminius Briegleb was the Rev. Gus Briegleb played by John Malkovich in The Changeling.

     What Clint Eastwood’s story does not say is just how close Rev. Briegleb was to the U.S. military and intelligence power elites through his contacts at Yale and Baltimore…..to the Nazi ambitions in Europe via his family ties to Walter Briegleb and to L.A.’s underworld kingpin,  Charles H. Crawford.    Crawford was baptized at St. Paul’s Church by Rev. Briegleb, but later shot and killed by L.A. prosecutor and judge, David H. Clark.

     Charles H. Crawford was head of the “City Hall Gang” that had been disregarding Mrs. Collin’s pleas for help in finding her missing son.   By the time Mrs. Collins' situation was becoming a public embarrassment, the City Hall Gang was in full "damage control" mode just as at Penn State, or in Omaha's Franklin Savings scandal cover-up was the name of the game, but The Changeling is also cover-up by avoiding the full story....sorry, Mr. Eastwood, Ms. Jolie, Mr. Malkovich.  Behind the "City Hall Gang's" bamboozling of the public were other motives that inform everything from the Rodney King beating, the O.J. Simpson murder case, to the "Freeway" Ricky Ross case that cost Gary Webb, a white man, his life for telling the truth of the matter.   Decades later the same issues abound in LA....Hello, Mr. Sterling! 

 

    Floyd Barriscale’s on-line blog that covers the history of St. Paul’s church states (Floyd B. Bariscale, Big Orange Landmarks: Exploring the Landmarks of Los Angeles, One Monument at a Time, from http://bigorangelandmarks.blogspot.com/2009/04/no-229-westminster-presbyterian-church.html): “Briegleb’s acceptance of Crawford into the fold along with the racketeer’s gift was controversial, of course. The Reverend R.P. Shuler, a former pal of Briegleb, broadcasted he would “just as soon baptize a skunk as to receive Crawford.” Shuler also maintained it was Crawford’s money that was financing Briegleb’s radio sermons in which he endorsed some of Charles H.’s pals for political office, a charge which the reverend later copped to. (In fact, Crawford’s unrealized plans to finance a permanent radio station in St Paul’s were revealed after his death.)”

     Floyd Bariscale's blog also shows that church loans for Briegleb's congregation were secured through Bank of America, the TransAmerican and Vatican related bank in San Francisco that would purchase CountryWide Mortgage after the 2008 bailout which also saw Bank of America buying Merrill Lynch formerly Merrill Lynch Pierce Fenner and Smith with the Pierce name connecting directly to the ancestors of President Franklin Pierce and Barbara Pierce Bush.  CountryWide had provided special low interest loans to Buck McKeon, Chair of the Congressional Armed Services Committee. McKeon, a graduate of Brigham Young University and a Mormon, comes from a tradition that is new to women's rights and civil rights in general and from a state that domiciles the NSA's new data mining storage facility.  Floyd Bariscale states:

In January 1931, the Los Angeles Times reported demolition of the old church buildings would begin on the 12th and that the congregation would hold services at the Home Theater on Jefferson west of Arlington till the new structure was complete. The article also quoted Rev. Briegleb’s saying St Paul’s had just received a $40,000 loan from the Bank of America along with a gift of a diamond ring – valued at $3,554 – from “well-known politician Charles Crawford”. It turns out Crawford would give more than jewelry to finance the new church building.

    When in 2014 a film starring Angelina Jolee’s husband, Brad Pitt, was directed by Steve McQueen, many did a double take.  “I didn’t know Steve McQueen had a son,” said one Academy Awards watcher.  It wasn’t Bullitt’s son.   This was Steve McQueen the black director from Amsterdam. His winning film was Twelve Years A Slave of which Ellen Degeneris said "It better win or we are all racists."  Of course, the blond Degeneris did not note that African American, Whoppi Goldberg, was dressed in black and the ruby slippers of the Wicked Witch to introduce Degeneris as Glenda the good white witch," said Frederick Ritchel, of the writers' group, Purple Pandas.  When Degeneris ordered the pizzas for everyone, but had no money who did she get it from, the stars and Harvey Weinstein," said Ritchel.  "Subtle stuff," said Ritchel.

     “Trying to follow the story line in Hollywood is as perplexing and knowing someone's real name,” said another Hollywood-watcher who noted that the attorney for Walter Collin’s mother, Sammy Kahn, died by self-inflicted drowning in 1957.   Self-inflicted drowning is about as rare as Gary Webb's two-shots-to-the-head suicide," she continued. 

      Rev. Gus Briegleb received an honorary doctorate from Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington the alma mater of U.S. Supreme Court Justice, William O. Douglas as well as U.S. Ambassador to Pakistan, Syria, Lebanon, Kuwait, Iraq and Afghanistan, the historic oil-rich opium producing region of the Golden Crescent, Ryan Crocker.

      “California has had a long history with the East Coast power elites for whom Henry Dana, Herman Melville, Edgar Allen Poe, James Russell Lowe and others were articulate voice pieces.  Hear no mistake about it.  Their weird intrigues, prevalent there in New England or Baltimore are prevalent in Los Angeles and San Francisco, too.  Their ordered life at Yale or Brown, Penn State or Princeton, informs life in every major U.S. city.  When Gary Webb exposed in Dark Alliance the CIA connection to LA’s “Freeway” Ricky Ross, the gig was up.  We just didn’t know what else wasn’t being exposed until that connection surfaced with Jerry Sandusky, Michael Hess’ story in another 2014 film, Philomena, and the Catholic Church connection in Philadelphia and St. Louis, the Paterno and Lawrence E. King connection to the 1988 Republican National Convention and King's pedophile connection with the Franklin Cover-up scandal,” said Mark Marenowski, a self-described “Hollywood watcher and part-time pedophile hunter.”

      "You have to ask yourself, why would Clint Eastwood not tell this part of the Walter Collins story?    Clint Eastwood?  The actor who at the 2012 Republican National Convention talks to Obama as if he's sitting in an empty chair and telling the world that Angelina Jolie's father, Jon Voight, dislikes Obama?   In Los Angeles where the Clipper's owner, Donald Sterling, has shown that among many Jewish power elites there are those who are as racist as the KKK for which Rev. Briegleb and Rev. Shuler were supporters, it's not hard to figure out," said Marenowski.   "Just as in Nazi Germany, tyranny made strange bed fellows.  It's also not hard to figure out just why LA blacks felt vindicated by O.J. Simpsons acquittal when he was married to Nicole Brown from Dana Point, California.  Tyranny begets cock-eye contradictions of all sorts," Marenowski concluded.

      Was Rev. Gustav Arminius Briegleb's interest in Walter Collins and his mother motivated by his place as a spiritual consigliore for the "City Hall Gang" controlled as it was by Charles H. Crawford?

      Then perhaps, the viewpoint of Klaus Briegleb comes into play.   Germany's Chancellor Helmut Schmidt who had reportedly been expelled from Hitler's Brown Shirts and remained staunchly anti-Nazi cited Karl Briegleb's work.  Schmidt gives us a peek into the mind behind an alternative universe so that perhaps now we better understand just how L.A.'s breakdown, breaks down. Why Mel Gibson can be demonized by Jewish actors and film makers for his father's Nazi sympathies and how behind the lofty claims of American exceptionalism lurks the dark alliances of out-and-out gang warfare, fight promoting and the racket of war.....none of which was a concern for a mother who had lost her only son.