NXIVM: Episode 5: The Bronfmans, Frank Parlato, and Money Laundering Part 2

In which we discuss the Bronfman relationship with the Salinas family that goes back a lot longer than either would care to admit, the Bronfman relationship with Frank Parlato which goes back longer than either would care to admit, and the Bronfman relationship with Keith Raniere's legal team which *checks notes* goes back further than either of them would care to admit

Music by DiffuseTensor

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:37

Hey guys, so I didn't record my normal scripted intro for the week because I felt like since we ended midway through an episode, I didn't have much else to say and I didn't want to repeat myself. So I figured let's just jump back into it this week. So the other thing I I tried doing at the beginning of this episode is I worried that maybe I didn't explain the financial stuff as clearly as I would have liked to in the last episode. And you know, one of my goals in this show, I think, is to try to demystify some of that stuff because I think that it's intentionally designed to make your eyes glaze over, and it's really not that complicated. It's just boring and using terminology a lot of people are not necessarily familiar with. And you know, I think that's something that's really important to understand because it's it's one of the fundamental mechanisms they use by which to steal from us. So I actually went back through and I recorded like what ended up being like 10 minutes trying to clarify myself from last time. And I got done with it and I re-listened to it, and I felt like I was still just repeating myself from last week, and I didn't want to do that. So I would say if you felt like you didn't understand me last week, please maybe try giving it another shot. And uh if that doesn't work for you, I would also say I kind of just wrote down some of the technical terms in order to maybe make it a little bit clearer too. Like if you want to understand the the mechanisms they were using by which they were laundering all of this money, I would definitely I would look up wash trading and I would look up intentional defaults. Those can also be called collateral abandonment. And between those two things, I think if you just read a real basic kind of synopsis on them, it'll it'll probably come together for you. But like there's an incredibly oversimplified way of just to kind of recapping and explaining where we left off. The basic trick is there's just three parties. There's the Bronfmans on one end, there's a shell company, most likely owned by the Bronfmans on the other end. That part I can't say 100% for certain because there's actually a lot of privacy laws in place as far as these sorts of trades go. So it's very hard to know where exactly the money went. But like I said before, the one other party that facilitates the trade between these two entities is the broker. And the broker was known for doing this specific thing. And basically, they're just pretending to lose money in order to transfer it back to themselves. And obviously, when you do that, like I, you know, I was mentioning it last week, it offers you the ability to now have this money completely separated from the trust. It also allows you to claim losses on your taxes. It can also be used as a way to pay somebody without paying them if the person on the other end is not one of your shell companies, but is instead somebody you've agreed to transfer money to, but you you want to do it not through the proper channels because you want to keep it secret. But, anyways, after we where we left off last week, I wanted to jump back in and I wanted to start out talking about the uh the relationship between the Bronfmanns and the Salinases. And this is something we'll definitely return to as well when we get to the episode on the Salinases, the the episode proper, the second one that will be coming later, there will be kind of a bookend to the prologue. But these two families are very entangled and very entangled in a way that can be proven on paper. And I know I mentioned it once before in an earlier episode, but in Sarah Edmondson's book Scarred, I found it very revealing that she mentions Emiliano Salinas being at a Nexium meeting or an executive success program meeting back in 2003. Because that's not the official story, that's not how it's presented. It's generally the official story is that years after this, Emiliano Salinas had his own charitable works he was doing, which we will get into in his episode, and that he realized that Nexium seemed to have a lot of the same goals, and then became interested in them and joined up with them. If you take Sarah Edmondson's word for it, and I honestly am very much willing to, one because the point of her book is not to throw shade at the Salinas family at all. In fact, I don't even think she realized what she was doing when her or her ghostwriter put that in there. I think she was just recounting an experience of hers that she had at the time. And then on top of that, too, she also mentions a woman that was with Emiliano Salinas, who he was dating back in 2003 and would not have been dating several years later. Which means to me that also she was not um misremembering something that actually happened several years later. And this is interesting because the Bronfmans and the Salinases go back to at least the 90s, if not further. And it's one of the reasons I chose to start this series with a history of NAFTA, actually, because NAFTA was a massive windfall for the Bronfmans, and it was a windfall for a couple of reasons. It was first of all, because they were able to use the new loosened trade restrictions in order to move more of their seagrams more cheaply, which allowed them to make money off of alcohol at much higher rates than they were prior in that region. But then also on top of that, they bought a bunch of infrastructure, they bought a bunch of expensive real estate, and we will get into their sort of media consolidation that happened in the 90s and in the 2000s, a little bit later in more depth this episode, but also they were building a really serious media division at the time, which included stakes and televisio, which was a state news channel that had just recently been opened up to private investment. And obviously, we're gonna get some more into it. There's a million different ways that the Bronfmans and the Salinases are connected financially and socially, but that would definitely be one example where it would be pretty hard to deny their connection because Tel Avicia was still mostly a state-run institution, and of course the Salinases would have been the presidential family at that point. But if you want to get deeper into the connections between these families, I would definitely say that the Clintons are a very good place to look because you know Bill Clinton was the president throughout the NAFTA period, and when he left office, he created the Clinton Global Initiative, and the Salinas family and the Bronfman family were both board members in this group, also founding friends, so like they were also even amongst the board members, they were especially high up because they had been some of the people who got in on it on the ground floor. They in fact donated about thirty thousand dollars to Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign in 2008, and she would actually end up giving it back a little while later when she felt like they were too much of a liability, but that certainly doesn't mean that the relationship with them ended. In fact, they were continuing to bundle money and then give it through other groups owned by the Braunfmans that just didn't have the literal Nexium name attached to it. One of those main groups would be the World Ethical Foundations Consortium, which was marketed as a sort of humanitarian wing to both the Clinton Global Initiative and Nexium. And so they would just kind of move money through Nexium to the World Ethical Foundations Consortium, and then from there to the Clinton Global Initiative. Uh Puma Abedin would oftentimes be a bridge between those groups as well. And in fact, they would continue to be such a large part of the Clinton Global Initiative that even when Hillary Clinton gave back the money, Nexium would later still show up on the Clinton Global Initiative's website for some of their supposed charity work. And then Nexium would provide the data and the psychological control over the heirs of these families, which is something that once we get to the Rainbow Cultural Gardens, I'll definitely spend some time getting more into as well. But I think that's a really important factor in all of this, too, is that they between the explorations of meanings they were doing and the stuff going on in the rainbow cultural gardens, they were gathering a lot of blackmail on a lot of powerful people. So you are joined in these institutions with them on one end, you are funding them, and then also on the other hand, you know, carrot and stick, you're also in a position to use blackmail against them if so needed. Emiliano Salinas also owned a company called ProSis Capital that was a private equity investment firm that also linked Nexia money to Mexican infrastructure and the Mexican aristocracy. So just this is just one giant web of very connected interests here is basically the takeaway. And also, this was not all they were doing as far as political engagement goes. It in fact goes much deeper. Uh, Kristen Gillibrand's father, Doug Rutnick, was on the Nexium payroll as a consultant for quite a while. And also simultaneously, Gillibrand herself was receiving donations from Claire and Sarah Bronfman. Uh, they also gave substantial donations to Chuck Schumer, and these would have all largely been because these were outside of politicians that they would just want in their pocket in general, also politicians that were in and around Albany, so it gave them a little bit of political control in their home base. They also had a relationship with Roger Stone, and he was hired on as a political fixer in Exiom's payroll for a decent amount of time. He would eventually break relationships with them, and I suspect it's because Roger Stone saw the way the wind was blowing, and even though the guy is an absolute monster, I do think he is a fairly Machiavellian political animal who has a pretty good sense of exactly what he could get away with. When Nancy Salzman's house gets raided, they'd actually find a box labeled Roger Stone, which contained some strategy memos and dossiers that Roger had worked up for them. Also, there were private bank records and photologs of judges and politicians. These would actually end up being some of the stuff that Nexium would end up being legally charged for. Roger Stone was able to avoid this by having plausible deniability, but I mean also it's in a box that's literally labeled with his name on it. So I have a very hard time believing he didn't either help gather this information or connect them with people who could help gather this information. Problem with this is that Frank Parlato himself just glows radioactive in like 10 different ways. So I highly question any narrative that he pushes. He's the guy that in most stories will be credited as this like independent investigative journalist who helped take down Nexium. And the story as it officially goes, I think I might have covered a little bit of this before, but just as a recap, as it officially goes, the story would be he was hired in 2007 to do PR for Nexium, that what he was saw, what he saw when he was there freaked him out, and he left, and then later on, as he saw more and more shady stuff going on with Nexium, he decided to become a truth teller and to use his platform to attack Nexium. Now, this guy is a fucking scam artist, and I think one of the clearest ways to see that is the fact that like after Nexium collapsed, he would go on to attack this group called OneTaste that is like a very weird, like orgasm-based new age cult, and he used the same platform, which is a couple of independent newspapers he has, and a blog called the Frank Report to attack them until One Taste paid him a $20,000 a month retainer, at which point Frank Barlato began to write pieces defending them. So, like, I don't I don't know how you could present yourself any more clearly as a scam artist when you are that willing to be able to just be bought. He has a very strange relationship with the Bronfmans and with Nexium in general, too, because he does get hired in 2007 to be a PR uh consultant for them, which is also odd because the man had absolutely no PR history at that point. He didn't appear to really actually do any PR work for them, and he left after a year, and I think the incredibly litigious Nexium cult would have sued him into oblivion for taking their money for a full year and giving them nothing in return if that had in fact been the case. I believe what he actually gave them in return was access to his property at one Niagara Center. And that is where the real utility of this guy comes in. This guy was not, in fact, the journalist at all at this point. He had no PR history, but what he was was a property owner and a slumlord and a guy connected to organized crime that was willing to play ball. And One Niagara Center is a really interesting building because not only is it directly on the border between the US and Canada, which I mean has a lot of use on its own when you are a group that will be later charged with human trafficking and that is wanting to quietly move people or things across borders. It is the highest vantage point in the area that lets you see the borders, it lets you see border patrols, and so you know, you have a couple of different options if you have access to this building, and one of them would be to look out from the roof of this place and just time people's movement at moments when places were not being patrolled. Obviously, you could pay off the people patrolling it. You also I think it is interesting. I don't know, it's not provable, but there have been rumors about tunnels being under this building for a long time, and it is a weird building. It was owned by Occidental Chemical prior to becoming a tourist center, and the layout of the building wasn't really changed that much. So there are a lot of secret areas, there's a lot of underground access. I don't think it's totally out of the question. The Bronfman sisters also would supposedly lend him a million dollars in 2008 for Los Angeles real estate investments with one Niagara Center put up as collateral, and there would be legal disputes over it for like the next 10 years or so. At one point, he would actually sell one Niagara Center to his attorney, which is a pretty wild ethical breach. It in fact is generally considered to be the move of somebody who is shielding assets. I mean, that's that's the most likely reason a person will sell a property that they own to the person legally representing them, is to get their name off. But he learned how to use the press to fight legal battles pretty early on after this. He bought the Niagara Reporter around the time that he was no longer working for Naxium, and he would use it to like attack businesses around the area in order to either eliminate them and to take over what they did, or to uh, you know, uh eliminate them as competition. I think the most famous dispute he would have would be with the Maid of the Mist Fairy Company. Where he basically drove this company into bankruptcy through his investigative reporting, which then benefited him because it was one of the only competitors in the area that was involved in moving people or things across borders and also like one of the main tourist spots. He would go on to buy another journalistic outlet as well called the Art Voice, which, if like the Niagara reporter was kind of like a scrappy tabloid, then which I would also say, as well, tabloid's long history of being run by organized crime. But he did, he also bought the Art Voice, which was supposed to be more of kind of a high-end local paper. And then he had his Frank report online. And in fact, he would do this thing sometimes where if he was trying to attack an entity, whether that is an Exiom or something else, he would use all three outlets. You know, you've got the tabloid running the tabloid story on them, you've got the art voice running the more thoughtful, like so intelligent piece on them, and then you have the Frank Report doing a kind of more gumshoe investigative journalism sort of thing. I absolutely believe he was working with the Bromfman through all of this. I think that in fact when Naxium was taken down, the best I can understand it, I think that there was a uh it was a controlled burn and he was their guy there to set the fire. He uh in fact would post a lot of leaked messages that I'm pretty sure a fair amount of them probably came from the Braunfmans, considering the fact that somebody had to be leaking these in the inner circle, and given his previous relationship with them, it just makes sense. I have a little bit of a hard time understanding exactly what the legal dispute over the $1 million I mentioned earlier was. I don't know if it was mostly just there to allow them to be adversaries on paper, or if they did have some sort of complicated relationship where they were kind of like frenemies. One thing I can say is that I find it very interesting that in 2018, right around the time he has really diverted and controlled the story of Nexium and made it specifically about you know this branding scandal and Keith Rainier and all of this, that the Bronfmans choose to just drop this lawsuit and let him keep the million dollars. Now, if we're talking about a controlled burn too, I don't think he was the only direction that the controlled burn was coming from. In fact, like, okay, so we have to get a little bit into the Bronfmans and their media companies and their media holdings because I think this really matters. So they owned William F. White International, which is a company that supplies equipment to basically every Canadian broadcasting company production. They owned Pinewood Toronto Studios, where almost all television productions in Canada are filmed, and they are on the board of Canadian Media Producers Association and have powerful seats on the board of the Directors Guild of Canada. These are all things that you can look up that are on paper. The Bronfmans have the Bronfmans have an incredible stranglehold on Canadian media, which is interesting to me because there have been several investigative podcast series that have come out under dubious or suspicious circumstances that were all released by the Canadian Broadcasting Company. One is called Inside Nexium's Inner Circle, and it's really interesting to me because it gets interviews with most of the people in the inner circle of Nexium, including Keith Rainier himself. And near the end of the series, the producer in it actually says that she is that she has gotten all of this information and she's gotten all of this audio footage, but that she is waiting because sources have told her that Keith Rainier is going to be arrested soon. So you have this incredibly pressian podcast where they're admitting they're talking to people somewhere inside. I don't know who these sources are. I mean, these sources are either like the Braunfmans themselves who have connections to, you know, a lot of the legal system, or they're like talking to the FBI or something, because there was not it, there would not have been many people that would have known that the Mexican police were going to arrest Keith Rainier in the near future, and that their podcast would be a lot better and more useful if they waited. Because, you know, if you released this podcast beforehand, it's this weird niche podcast about this group the vast majority of people have never heard of. And would you hold it for a few months and you wait for Keith Renhiri to be arrested? Now you are releasing a podcast that is this inside line to like what are the biggest news stories happening at the time. So super sus. And then this is not the it's not like a huge deal, like because I a lot of people do birthrights, but I do think it shows just how inclined these people would be to do the Bronfman's bidding. There's another podcast released through the CBC called Uncover Escaping Nexium that the producer actually she the last episode is her getting an interview with the Braunfman sisters, and she actually says in it, oh, I actually have a weird connection to the Braunfmanns because Edgar Prom Bronfman through his charity paid for me to travel to Israel for birthright. So I don't know, would you really when you put all of this together? You have Frank Parlato, who seems to get into journalism basically out of nowhere, has a several decade-long relationship with the Braunfmans. You have three podcasts released by the CBC, two that I just mentioned, and then another one that I I find less interesting. This basically like a rehabilitative project for Allison Mack after she got out of prison. It takes place a couple of years later. But you have two that are controlling the narrative that's happening. And then I'm like, the one other place where this narrative is really being structured and controlled is in that the vow documentary that I mentioned. And Mark Vicente is going to be my episode next week, and I will have a lot to say after that about what it means that these are the main places from which we get our understanding of Nexium and what it was and how it came down. Which almost left me speechless when I first found out about it. It's so I don't know how anybody who considers themselves any sort of serious journalist or investigator or anything could possibly let this fact go. I mean, the story that will be told is that, you know, Sarah Bronfman got out of the cult. She realized it was a cult, she went on to marry Vast Igtet, who is a Libyan prime minister with many of the same connections to Adnan Khashoggi and those networks that her mom would have had, but don't think about that too hard. And she would go from there to start these schools in France called the Aethel Education Schools, which I will definitely be getting more into as well when we touch on the rainbow cultural gardens, because we don't have a lot of information about the rainbow cultural gardens, but we do have a little bit more information about ethyl education, which seems to be ruddy, if not exactly almost exactly the same curriculum in playbook. But either way, that's what Sarah does. Claire, on the other hand, ends up spending a couple of years in prison. And the story is that she still to this day is so hypnotized by Keith that he's getting her to waste her money paying for everybody's legal fees. Which give me a fucking break. If a woman who got two to three years is paying the legal fees of everybody involved in a giant criminal operation, the person who got 120 years is not the person doing the manipulating here. It's so brazen, I almost have a hard time even knowing what to say about it. Like, are you are you fucking kidding me? Like you got to pay the people for putting together his defense, which was horrible, by the way. Uh Keith Rainier's defense as put forward by his lawyers is basically like, yes, he did everything he was accused of, but actually that's okay. You know, they'll take random things like uh being like, oh yeah, well, you know, he was he had, you know, DOS, which was supposedly his baby, that like where they were taking women and holding them down on a table against their will and oftentimes sometimes and branding them. But you know, if it happened to like a man in the military, you wouldn't think anything of it, like, or whatever. Like just insane, insane arguments like this. Like these these lawyers were and these are high-priced lawyers too. That's the thing, is like these are not cheap lawyers, these are lawyers the Braunfmans have connections with and they're paying for, and this absolute bumblefuck shitty job they did is I find it to be extremely telling. Because you know, like, so you get to decide the narrative that that is being told in court if you own everybody's lawyers, because they didn't just own his lawyers, they own they paid for Alice and Mack, they paid for Nicky Klein, they paid for the Solzman's. Their their well, their legal team is representing all of these people. And then even after everything falls into place, they're still paying Keith's legal fees to this day. And you know, you might wonder what does a guy who have who already has 120 years in prison have to lose? And it's like, well, he has to lose his appeals. Like these lawyers are still his appeals are running out, they're still filing some appeals. He has his comfort to lose, you know, they what could they do owning his legal team to make his life more difficult in prison? Um, so yeah, so it's just another one of those moments to me where like I find it, and I suspect as long as I continue to do this show, I will forever find it shocking how often stories get told about things that when you actually examine them critically, they just fall apart and they're so silly. Like, I can't I mean this is there are dozens of journalists that get paid good money to do this. They work for some of the most esteemed journalistic institutions in the US that just go, oh, okay, yeah, I guess Claire's just still hypnotized by mastermind Keith, and so she's paying for his lawyers, and nobody stops to go, well, like actually, what does this mean in a material sense whatsoever? I don't know. I'm I'm I know I'm probably rambling a little bit at this point, so I'm gonna go ahead and just end the episode there. Got a really good episode, I think, coming out next week. I'm excited for it. As always, thank you so much for tuning in. Please give me five stars and review me if you haven't. I love feedback, so please, I mean, you can reach out to me, do whatever. Like, I I love hearing what people think, knowing how to make it better, so please do that. Keep an eye out for I do want to start a Patreon probably in the next couple of weeks, like I was saying. And I also would very much like to thank the artist Diffuse Tensor, who is a musician that contacted me on Spotify and offered to give me a little bit of music to make this podcast sound a little bit nicer. It's where my intro came from and a couple of my uh little interludes. They also gave me some outro music I'm about to play in just a minute to play us out of here, but please go check out their music. It's very good. I am so thankful they did such an incredible job with capturing the tone I was going for with this show and giving me something that I could really use that I think adds a lot. So yeah, thank you again, Diffuse Tensor. Very much appreciated. Please check out their stuff, and I will see you guys next week. I just noticed real listening to this that I called Vast a pet the prime minister of Libya, and what I should have said is that he is a Libyan politician who ran for prime minister at one point.