NXIVM: Episode 6: Mark Vicente, Intelligence, and the Controlled Burn

In which we discuss Mark Vicente's family with multi-generational ties to intelligence, how he ended up in NXIVM, his strange behavior during his time there, and his "documentary" series The Vow for HBO

Music by DiffuseTensor

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:02

Now on our path upward, let us take some time for an interlude and let us examine those operators near the ground floor. Those who stay unprotected enough that they only manage to avoid absolute destruction through a particularly sharp set of emotional and intellectual skills, as well as a deep, unabiding sociopathy that is willing to break any moral barrier and destroy anybody without a moment's hesitation. That ability to live on the edge can be easy to romanticize until we look deep inside them and remember they are vessels with seemingly no ideology and no set of values beyond their own self-preservation. Mark Vicente comes from a family of these cold reptilian operators who make the Bronfmans with their endless ego and a world set up to guarantee they win every time. Or the Kaffrits family with their Machiavellian willingness to sacrifice their daughters for the gain of the larger unit look positively human by comparison. The closest person we've come across so far to Mark Vicente is Nancy Salzman. But even she was unable to play the game perfectly, with both her and her daughter facing legal challenges. Mark Vicente, on the other hand, the South African spy who would spend years carrying on an incredibly close friendship with Keith Rainier, a man he would eventually systematically dismantle and destroy, both legally and reputationally, would walk away from the wreckage, looking like a victim and a hero. Some families were aristocracy who saw Keith as their employee. Others were desperate and turned on him when it became him or them. But Mark Vicente, he entered with his eyes wide open, knowing he would liquidate this asset, knowing he would destroy this man, and never once hesitated. Welcome to the Dust Light Archives. Okay, so Mark Vicente. I have been excited since I started this series to get into Mark Vicente because I felt like he's somebody that needs to be in the middle or in the back half narratively. But at the same time, you know, if you're trying to craft a compelling narrative, which, you know, I'd say is one of my two big goals with this show, the other one being to investigate and lay out these sorts of complex contradictions that other people aren't talking about within these stories. But, you know, if if you're trying to create a really compelling narrative, one of the easiest ways to do that is to have a character that is very compelling. And Mark Vicente is a fucking, he is a fascinating guy. Like, I know I mentioned Lauren Salzman being another one of those to me earlier, and and Lauren Salzman is a little bit difficult because there's so little to work with with her. Like, you really are forced to just draw conclusions and make inferences based on her actions and what we know about how she grew up. Whereas Mark Vicente, I mean, this man can't stay away from a microphone, he can't stay away from a camera, and he is. A lot of the time, these are people that move back and forth between, say, like the mafia and intelligence agencies. And they tend to be very fascinating because the way he tends to write them is almost like like adrenaline junkies who are completely psychopathic and are only out for themselves, but are also very skilled operators at the same time. And I see a lot of a James Ellroy character in in Mark Vicente. And Mark Vicente, I think, is a much, much smarter guy than he lets on. And it's hard to see that core of who he is. It takes a little bit of time because he has blanketed himself in this naive, wishy, washy, new agey, love and light sort of aura that I think is a disguise. Like I think it's a flat-out fiction that the more I've learned about him, the more I am convinced that he does not actually buy into it all. And regardless of the ethics of a person like that, certainly just from a character standpoint, that's the pretty interesting person. So let's talk about his history a little bit. He grew up in South Africa. The furthest back I can kind of trace his family. And you know, I'm always on a time crunch with these things. I spend so much time working on these, but of course, like I believe you could take any single one of these subjects, and a person with enough dedication could probably dedicate their life to teasing out all of these nuances, so I don't always know everything. But as far as I personally can trace it back, I have been able to move down his family tree to his grandfather. And even when it comes to his grandfather, the information becomes fairly sketchy. Like his grandfather, I know was a high-level advertising executive in South Africa. He was pretty wealthy. He actually built and created a aristocratic stronghold about 45 minutes outside of Johannesburg called Boondu. And this is where a this is where Mark spent a lot of time growing up. And as far as Mark himself, he was also born in 1965 in Johannesburg, South Africa. And this is one of the reasons that I do believe this hood on that he has as far as being this sort of naive seeker really is pretty demonstrably bullshit. Is this man grew up in an incredibly tumultuous time in South Africa? And as we're about to see, was very tied into the propaganda arm of the state. His entire family was. And as I was saying before, like it's obviously like pay stubs aren't necessarily going to exist for this, but it's pretty clear she was pretty well integrated into that system at that time, especially considering the fact that in 1988, while working as a diplomat, she was using her husband, who was working at the Voice of America at the time, to steal transcripts and then use her diplomatic cover to transfer them to South Africa. When they were caught, they were not prosecuted, they were protected diplomatically, and the South African Broadcasting Company brought them back to South Africa, where his mom continued to have diplomatic duties, and his dad worked for the propaganda arm of South African media. And from a young age, Mark also began to do film work for South Africa. He, in fact, filmed several pro-apartheid documentaries as a teenager while interning. Eventually, and I think it would show like what kind of a chameleon he is. In 1992, he would get his big break filming Serafina, which is an anti-apartheid film starring Whoopi Goldberg that was filmed in South Africa, but for several US production companies. One of those production companies would, in fact, be uh Disney, and specifically, Disney was doing like distribution on this through their Blaina Vista outlet, and she would really try to spin this into something it wasn't necessarily because he was 23 years old at this point, so Mark Vicente would kind of go around claiming that he was the youngest cinematographer to have ever worked for Disney, which is a little bit untrue because Serafina was not really like a Disney production like that. But either way, in 1992, Mark would move to America and he would start Lord of the Winds Films. And this is a production company he would own from 1992 to 2004, and it's really unclear where he got his financing from because I mean, like, this is not a cheap thing to do. You know, it it requires being able to pay rent, buy equipment, pay for legal incorporation, uh, the ability to move through LA's expensive social scene. And during this time period, he wasn't making anything really, and certainly nothing that would justify the level of money he was spending for 12 years. And I find that to be pretty interesting because production studios are actually great fronts for intelligence-linked operatives, you know, because it it justifies travel, high-end surveillance equipment, and interviews with powerful people. It basically almost any excuse you would need to do anything for an intelligence organization would also be a reason you could be doing something for a production company. But either way, it's at some point he hooks up with this cult leader named Jay-Z Knight, and she is a channeler who runs a cult called Ramtha that is based around the idea that she is channeling a 35,000-year-old Lemurian who is giving her information. She, you know, you definitely could do multiple episodes on H. P. Blavatsky and Theosophy, which I mean people definitely have. It's sort of an offshoot of that. I mean, the whole Lemurian thing is like a weird, specifically theosophical spin on the idea of the Atlantis myth. And you know, this gets played very much as him being a, like I was saying before, kind of a love and light seeker who ends up getting taken in by this cult. It reads to me a lot more like a guy with a production company who stumbled upon a group that was willing to pay him for his contracting services. And he would make a very successful film, given the uh cheap production costs from this situation called What the Bleep Do We Know. I'm not sure if you, as a listener, will be familiar with this. I think it probably is something that's very of a specific time. I know when I was a teenager and had just discovered weed, this movie was popular amongst some people that I knew back then. It's like a it plays real fast and loose with quantum physics, and it's kind of one of those things where it just tries to hit you with one mind-blowing fact after another that's sort of half true. The fact that he's filming it for this cult is kept kept a little bit on the DL. Like the cult leader is interviewed throughout it, and there are a lot of subtle nods to their belief system as well as a credit at the end of the movie. But I know the people I knew who saw it when I was a teenager, and I think your average person could watch the whole thing without necessarily knowing it was a recruitment film for a cult on some level. But that blows up in like 2004, and then I think he kind of gets put in this position where like uh there are some financial battles between him and Jay-Z Knight a little bit, as well as like battles over control of this property, because you know they the original goal was to continue to put out more what the bleep do we know merchandise and sequels and stuff, which happened a little bit, but not very much because it did fall apart fairly quickly. And then Mark runs into Nexium, and I think the best way of looking at this would be that he had kind of sucked Rampha dry at this point, and there wasn't much more he could get from them, but this new Nexium cult could really kind of get him to level up, like you know, on the one hand, I think the specific aesthetic that Rampha was pushing was going a little bit out of style, you know, like the channeling some like several hundred thousand-year-old entity thing is like a little bit passe, and then you have Nexium that's doing this more like rationalist approach and something a little bit more Scientology-tinged, uh, doing these executive success programs and being a little bit more relatively grounded, or at least being a little bit more relatively uh bullshit in a way that's not quite as old-fashioned. And then on top of that, I mean, you have like several people from the entertainment scene floating around Nexium at this point. You know, this around the time Alice and Mackl join. Uh the Bronfmans themselves are a part of this at this point, and I mean would have just dropped $150 million into the cult. Like by the time that Mark joins, I mean, they have their own private airplane. And because of his reputation, he's allowed to kind of just cut ahead in line and to immediately become part of the leadership of this cult too, which I think was probably appealing. He, in fact, brings his mom on as a bookkeeper, which this is something that's been kept way on the DL that I did not know until very recently. Just and and I only found it by looking through class action lawsuits and seeing her name. Like, this man does not mention one time anywhere in the two seasons of The Vow that his mother was ever in this cult. Uh, and she was a bookkeeper, by the way. So she she was, you know, handling the money. And she, I don't know if he's ever mentioned it anywhere, frankly, because the man has uh over a hundred podcast episodes of his podcast called WTF is on my mind, which I mean there's a lot I'll do for this podcast, but listening to all of those is is not one of them. But this really kind of changes the whole story because now you're like, this is this goes from being like a guy who made a film and got trapped into this cult into like a guy from a spy family that's like contracted out to this cult, which is I think one reason that he you will not really hear him ever mention it. He will meet his wife Bonnie inside of the cult, and she was like a somewhat Successful Star Wars bit actress. She's an Australian star and singer. They got married in 2008 in a big Nexium ceremony. I tried looking into her. I couldn't find anything too terribly interesting about her or that really stood out outside of the fact that um, I mean, she also went to a Waldorf school just like Keith Rainier did. Um, but I mean, that's whatever. Uh, she definitely would play a pretty pivotal role in the destruction of this cult later on, which leads me to believe that she was definitely in on Mark's game at some point. Now, one of the darkest, weirdest things that Mark Vicente would do while he was in this cult is he at some point decided the the story is he decided he was going to make a documentary on Mexican cartels. And like, even what exactly this documentary is is very unclear. Like anything he's ever said about it, it sounds like the basic concept was that these Mexican cartels don't have any empathy, so by looking at them, you could understand how to do the opposite of them and get empathy or something. He would use the Salinas family and all of the connections in Mexico in order to meet up with these drug cartels in order to get film. And I will say I am not convinced at all that this was ever supposed to actually be a documentary, the same way I was saying before, like, you know, a production company is a good front. A documentary is also a good front, especially when you actually look at what this was used for. So he ends up either filming or getting his hands on film of like extreme Mexican cartel torture. Things like uh like a person being dismembered piece by piece, you know, cutting off like each one of their fingers, each one of their toes, and just kind of like moving up through their limbs and uh g, you know, healing the wounds and staunching the bleeding so that you could continue to do this for as long as possible. Uh, there was a man who, according to reports on video, was forced to eat a piece of his own brain. And he has his hands on these videos and he delivers them to Brandon Porter, who is a Nexium doctor that I think I have mentioned before, but that was like doing really creepy like mind control and neurological and stress test experiments using these videos, forcing people to watch them, and then monitoring their brain waves, you know, their reactions, things like that. And that's just what we know of for a fact. The doctor would actually get 40 years in prison for this. I will say that Rainbow Cultural Gardens being the black hole that it is, that I definitely questioned whether this footage was also used in these schools, given that trauma-based mind control does have a certain level of factual history being used against children and being experimented with. That I mean, the these schools were doing incredibly weird, oftentimes very destructive psychological experiments. So I I wouldn't imagine any serious ethical dilemmas as far as using that footage in those contexts either. But obviously, like there's there's no proof of that. And it's funny too that trauma study that Brandon Porter did, uh, eventually, as part of his plea deal for the FBI, uh, Mark Vicente would hand over these videos, and then Brandon Porter would hand over all of the data from these tests. And so we and this went on for seven years. So now we have an incredibly extensive private mind control study that was conducted, seized by the FBI, and now is part of a federal archive. So make of that what you will. You know, where Keith is calling him his best friend, where, you know, especially near the end where Keith is worried that things are starting to fall apart, and Mark, who knows damn well it is, who's actually orchestrating it behind the scenes, is calming him down and convincing him everything is going to be okay. He will eventually also testify in court and really just put the final nails in the coffin for Keith. Like I said before, like Keith isn't a good guy, but like I don't, I don't know. I don't think I could do that. I don't think most people would have it in them to be such a cold-blooded actor for so long. And it really becomes apparent just how orchestrated this was when his wife Bonnie leaves in early 2017. And what seems to happen here is that she leaves about a year before he does, and Mark plays it off as if he is distraught that his wife would leave and that he wants to get her back. Meanwhile, he is having private conversations with her, where I have to imagine he is orchestrating the specifics of how to coordinate all of these different moving parts into take this thing down in a way that is advantageous to them. Um, because they're doing this thing where Mark starts collecting people from Nexium quietly, and you know, using this DOS program is one of the big, you know, uh sort of final straws in order to get people to turn on it. And the first thing he would do is he would take somebody into this room, and we know this because uh there's several accounts of it. One of them is in Sarah Edmondson's book. Um Alison Mac has spoken on it at one point where like he would basically have a private meeting with them, and he would be like, I want to tell you something, but before I tell you anything, you need to sign this NDA. Which I mean, like at that point, you're to make somebody sign an NDA there is you are making sure that you have full narrative control over this story full stop, no matter what. Like they don't even know what the story is yet, and already they're completely signing over their right to say anything that contradicts whatever it is you wanted to tell. And so we'd get them to sign this NDA, and then he would be like, they're doing this DOS thing, and they're branding people, and you know, who knows what else he would even say to them at this point. Um, and he would convince them to leave, at which point he would send them to his wife, who was already outside of the cult. His wife was hooked up with Catherine Oxenberg, who we will be talking about next episode, and Frank Parlato, who we talked about last episode. And they would begin leaking these sorts of testimonials and gathering up all of these different people that would be willing to testify against the cult. In fact, uh, funny enough, Mark Vicente just has a group of like friends in the DEA that know people in the FBI, according to him, and he is able to very quickly and quietly arrange for a bunch of people to take legal depositions. And the final phone call between him and Keith before Mark jumps ship with a bunch of videos and hard drives and stuff, I find to be very creepy because it certainly seems like he is playing Keith like a fiddle and getting Keith to actually lie about stuff that's provable on record so that later on he could be charged with criminal intent and conspiracy, which he is. And, you know, this is in the vow. In the vow, he plays it as if like he's trying to give Keith one more chance to explain himself, and when it's still apparent that this was all just a lie and he was tricked, then that's when he takes off. And you know, it's obviously framed as him taking off as some sort of moral, you know, uh, some sort of moral stand or some sort of desperate attempt to flee something that has gotten out of control. It looks to me a lot more like an act of corporate espionage, especially when you do consider the fact that he packed up everything of legal importance he could get his hands on before he left. And it's really crazy because like near the end of 2017, this is when he leaves, and he hands over these videotapes to the FBI, and the FBI uses them for its legal case. And before 2017 is even over, Mark Vicente has friends of his that are directors hired to film the last several episodes, what would end up becoming the last several episodes of The Val. And, you know, this is just my feeling. You would have to watch it for yourself. But, you know, there's scenes where he's figuring out stuff he should have already known and acting surprised about it. I mean, at this point it's him and his wife, and Sarah Edmondson uh plays a big role in the last few episodes, who's an actress, and they're they're acting for the camera in front of a friend of his that's a director. Like this whole thing is I mean, you could argue about the level to which it's staged, but I mean, I don't think if you're being honest with yourself, I don't really think there's any denying that it is in fact staged. I mean, like, they're like creating scenes where they're like, you know, out on a dock and he's talking to Sarah Edmondson's husband, and they're just being like, how could he have tricked us like this? I don't understand. And, you know, uh Mark's being like, you weren't you weren't an idiot, you were just too trusting, and you couldn't have known. And it's like this is this is not how real conversations happen. This is not where real conversations happen. Like you brought a film crew out here to a scenic area to film this. Like, give me a fucking break. Um, there's a scene with them and Katherine Oxenberg in the kitchen of, I believe, Pathrin's home, where they're talking about how Mark's wife was forced to lay on the floor for one night as penance for something she did, and that Mark let her do it, and Mark can't believe what a bad husband he was, and then his wife's like, No, you weren't, you were a great husband, you couldn't have known, and they're all fake crying, and it's just it's so consciously filmed to set up a narrative that I find it insulting. And so, anyway, that's late 2017. By early 2019, uh HBO has bought this documentary. Keith Rainier has not even been found guilty yet. And I mean, just the speed and the intent with which this thing moves, I think, is a major gimbal. And anyway, so after the trial, uh, Mark and Bonnie would go on to move to Portugal, and from there they would basically become like anti-cult experts and become part of the anti-cult industry. They host a podcast, like I said, he has a podcast called WTF is on my mind, where he talks about cults and he interviews people who are in cults. Uh, Sarah Edmondson and her husband have a podcast called A Little Bit Culty as well. And these all of these people they bounce back and forth, they interview each other, they promote each other's podcasts, and they're just uh even years later, just continuing to make money off of this. Also, doing it in Portugal, which is a real good place to do it because they technically can extradite somebody to the US if they're compelled enough to, but Portugal typically does not. And also, it's incredibly hard to sue anybody who is living in Portugal if you are in the United States. So, you know, they're kind of protecting themselves legally in that sort of a way, too. Like I said, his mom is currently still involved in several class action lawsuits as the uh person suing, or as part of the class action group. So she's also still trying to milk money out of this thing. And yeah, I don't know. I I find this whole group of people to be incredibly sketchy. I hope that I have managed to get that across, and I think that's gonna be it for this week. I kind of wanted to talk about my plans moving forward because I've been thinking a lot about what to do as far as this podcast goes, because like I've been really happy with its growth, and it's really important to me to continue to do quality research and to take my time with these things, and I know that I am hitting a wall before log where I don't know if I'm going to be able to keep up with this weekly as is. And I also really, if possible, I mean, it's not it's not about the money at all, but I do work full-time, and if it would be possible to make a little bit of money on the side to give me some breathing room to do this, I mean that would be incredible. You know, I really think at this point now, it's like I work 40 hours a week. I spend, man, I probably it it's hard to gauge because I I research these things in um layers. Like I like I do my original research, and then kind of as I'm putting together weekly episodes, I do more research. But like, I mean, between the research, the recording, the editing, the scripts, I mean, I bet you I spend like 12 to 15 hours an episode on top of that, and it's just it it's becoming untenable as is. So what I have been thinking about doing is finishing up this Nexium series, and then maybe after that, starting a Patreon and moving these episodes I've been doing now onto an a bi-monthly schedule, so once every other week as opposed to once every week, and then also at the same time doing like a Patreon book club, it would be less labor-intensive and easier to do. You know, I was thinking about um recently Sinister Forces by Peter Levenda came out, and that's a book that I know is very complicated and requires pretty deep analysis in order to parse what is worthwhile and what is not in it. And I was thinking about maybe making that the first book, but yeah, so I'm gonna start a Patreon before log. Hopefully, some of you will join me, and then we're gonna keep doing what we're doing. I already have the next two series kind of planned in my head and a little bit of work put into them as far as like these long form investigative series, but then also every other week on my Patreon, I'd love to go over like 50 pages or so of a book that maybe we're reading together and kind of give analysis on it and stuff, and you know, mix it up between those two formats, anyways. Let me know what you think. Please, as always, I appreciate the five-star reviews. If you give me some five-star reviews and comments, it's very much appreciated. I always appreciate feedback. Feel free to reach me in any of the ways where I'm available and let me know what you think of this idea. And I will see you next week with the Oxenberg.