Conspiracy Nation -- Vol. 6 Num. 06

("Quid coniuratio est?")


JIMMY ROTHSTEIN -- 09/13/95

I spoke by phone with Jimmy Rothstein, long-time detective (now retired) with the NYPD Vice Squad.

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CONSPIRACY NATION:
You were a New York City Vice Squad detective for how many years?

JIMMY ROTHSTEIN:
12 years.

CONSPIRACY NATION:
How did you become interested in the Inslaw case?

JIMMY ROTHSTEIN:
I had worked as a detective, and I had locked up and dealt with some CIA people. (That's how I got retired.) And then after I got retired, people kept calling me. And then when the thing came up with Michael Riconosciuto, that's how I got involved.

CONSPIRACY NATION:
And when you locked up these CIA people, did they talk to you at all? Give you inside information?

JIMMY ROTHSTEIN:
Oh yeah! We had... For instance, one of 'em was Frank Sturgis. And then we grabbed another guy who was involved in the killing of 3 little boys that they were usin' for human compromise stuff, you know? They use them to extort people.

CONSPIRACY NATION:
Could you go into that a little bit? Give some more details on that?

JIMMY ROTHSTEIN:
Yeah. We had, in 1972 I arrested a guy by the name of Dan Rose(?). And he was a notorious pedophile. And we had information, we knew that he was picking up these kids and pimping 'em off. And what we found that, when we arrested him, he started talking. And one of the things he gave us, said "Three little boys had been murdered in his apartment." And one of the guys was a CIA guy.

And we started investigating it, and we eventually served him with a subpoena to appear in front of the New York State Select Committee on Crime, to which I had been appointed by the governor at the time, [Hugh] Carey(sp?). And it was stopped because of "national security".

We confronted this guy, face to face.

CONSPIRACY NATION:
So there was some CIA guy involved in the murder of 3 little boys...

JIMMY ROTHSTEIN:
Yeah.

CONSPIRACY NATION:
...and, but because he had connections, they did the "national security" thing.

JIMMY ROTHSTEIN:
He was CIA. And they just invoked that "national security".

CONSPIRACY NATION:
Okay. And goin' back to Frank Sturgis, was he knowledgeable about Inslaw?

JIMMY ROTHSTEIN:
Oh no, no, no. That had nothin' to do with Inslaw. But that's what made the roadwork for me to get all this other information. Because I got anonymous phone calls. I started gettin' calls from... on everything. But Inslaw stuff came up when Michael Riconosciuto surfaced.

CONSPIRACY NATION:
And what year would that have been?

JIMMY ROTHSTEIN:
Oh God. I haven't been talkin' to Riconosciuto in at least 5 years. Figure about '90.

And I had met with Bill and Nancy Hamilton and gave them the background to how a lot of this stuff works, and how... You know, at first they couldn't believe that this was, it was bein' done by government. And so when I gave 'em the background to all of this, that's how I got into it. In fact, how I got to meet Bill and Nancy was through Dave McMichaels. 'Cuz me and McMichaels had been working on some other things where I had found that the CIA was bringin' the cocaine into the United States, back in the early '70s, part of that stuff in New York.

CONSPIRACY NATION:
Okay, and they were bringin' that in as a way to pay for the arms.

JIMMY ROTHSTEIN:
Well see, at that time... It originally started off, why they had the cocaine business set up in South America was to give them a cash crop so they wouldn't go communist. This was in the late '60s, early '70s. And then later on, this became part of the drugs and guns, and stuff like that. The Iran-Contra and all this sh**.

CONSPIRACY NATION:
But originally it was so they would have a good income for their country and they would side with the U.S. and not go with Russia.

JIMMY ROTHSTEIN:
Yeah. Yeah. And we actually watched this go down in New York. We had been on it for awhile. And eventually, we interviewed people who verified all of this. And we had the whole run-down on it, and we had all the names and how it worked. We found this while we were doin' a homicide investigation.

CONSPIRACY NATION:
And did you try to alert higher-ups about this?

JIMMY ROTHSTEIN:
Oh yeah. Yeah. Everybody was told that it was covered up all the way down the line. In fact, at one point in one of these operations they -- to get us off the trail -- they bombed my apartment with a shrapnel bomb.

CONSPIRACY NATION:
So you became knowledgeable. And then, Riconosciuto surfaced. How were you put in contact with him? Did he begin calling you, to talk with you?

JIMMY ROTHSTEIN:
No. Originally, I was asked to talk to Riconosciuto by Jim Vaselos(sp?) who is his lawyer in Chicago.

CONSPIRACY NATION:
All right. And so you were talkin' with him a lot by phone and...

JIMMY ROTHSTEIN:
Yeah.

CONSPIRACY NATION:
...he basically told you his story about what had been goin' on with Inslaw and everything.

JIMMY ROTHSTEIN:
Yeah. And then what I did is, I was brought out to Chicago by Vaselos to interview Riconosciuto. And in the meantime, I had talked to a lot of people who were involved with Riconosciuto. And so when I met with him, and talking to him on the phone over a period of time, I was able to verify a lot of the things that Riconosciuto said. In fact, I went to Yuma, Arizona, to check out his arrest that he had when he was with Peter Viedniks(sp?) and Robert Booth Nichols.

We were able to verify even more things about Riconosciuto. Plus the fact, when I started interviewing Riconosciuto, certain things became quite apparent. And we determined that he, in fact, had gotten into all of this at the age of 13, when he was recruited by Chuck [Unclear] of the CIA to work in this human compromise business.

CONSPIRACY NATION:
He was recruited when he was 13. Why'd they recruit him? Because his family...

JIMMY ROTHSTEIN:
Well... He was used as what is referred to as a "chicken" -- he was a little boy?

CONSPIRACY NATION:
You mean for sex?

JIMMY ROTHSTEIN:
The sex part, yes. But he was used to compromise people.

You see, when I started talking to him I saw a certain pattern here that I had observed over the years of working this. And the only way he could have done this type of stuff at the age he was at is that he had to have been used. And when I asked him, then we went into this whole thing. And that's how I was able to verify his connections to New York, and a lot of things that he told me were then verified through that.

I don't know if you're familiar with that scene or not.

CONSPIRACY NATION:
To an extent. I've been coverin' this kind of stuff for about 2 years now.

JIMMY ROTHSTEIN:
Well then you know what I'm talkin' about.

CONSPIRACY NATION:
Yeah, sure. How the CIA would set people up, and then they would use that to blackmail them.

JIMMY ROTHSTEIN:
Yeah. And see, Riconosciuto: that's how he got into all of this. Because, at a very young age -- I don't know if you're aware of it or not, but we have come up with a lot of the documents that he was tellin' people they had. In fact, Kevin I think last night put on the Internet the affidavit from [Dr. Earl] Brian's secretary, you know?

CONSPIRACY NATION:
Okay, and that was from 1993, with the secretary that...

JIMMY ROTHSTEIN:
Yeah.

CONSPIRACY NATION:
What's the significance of the affidavit?

JIMMY ROTHSTEIN:
The important part of that affidavit is the connection of Peter Viedniks(sp?). Peter Viedniks is a customs official. (I have his resume' somewhere.) And he was always CIA, Customs, Justice -- you know, he would wander in and out. And what's important here was, they needed somebody in Customs so that they could get this stuff smuggled out of the country.

CONSPIRACY NATION:
Okay, so he was an accomplice?

JIMMY ROTHSTEIN:
Yeah, yeah. And the thing is, he denies that he ever knew these people.

[...to be continued...]


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