Bannon-the article

[Sam Browning]

I. Introduction

In 2003 David "Race" Bannon published a book entitled "Race Against Evil: The Secret Missions of the Interpol Agent Who Tracked the World's Most Sinister Criminals - A Real Life Drama." [1] This 322 page book contains repeated tales of mortal Martial Arts combat, covert darring-do and sharp edge assassinations by a supposed member of a previously unknown section of Interpol. Interpol, an International police agency best known for circulating international arrest warrants, has denied ever hearing of Mr. Bannon. When asked Michael Rose chief press officer for Interpol in Lyon, France responded with this official statement:

Interpol's General Secretariat in Lyon "has no record of David Race Bannon having been employed and no knowledge of individuals mentioned in Mr. Bannon's book. Interpol exists to facilitate the exchange of information between the world's law enforcement agencies and to provide analysis of criminal data and other services. Accordingly, if the claims in Mr. Bannon's book are in fact as have been reported to Interpol, they can only be seen as deceptive and irresponsible fantasy." see The Charlotte Observer, "Interpol: Bannon was not an Agent", Olivia Fortson, February 25, 2003, Edition One-Three, page 8E

David "Race" Bannon claims to be a be 3rd degree Black Belt in Hapkido, [2] and his story contains repeated descriptions of weaponless and armed combat. Because of his claims involving the martial arts, over the last two years Bullshido members have investigated the claims made by Mr. Bannon that could be checked. What we have found is the following. 1) Mr. Bannon's claims are not supported by the available evidence. 2) The lack of foundation for these claims indicates that most, if not all of them were fabricated.

Much of the material you will read below was previously printed, on a thread of the internet discussion forums of Kung Fu Magazine http://tinyurl.com/bpecp
Mr. Bannon, and Jason Putman, who cooperated on an article about Mr. Bannon called "Kungfu Secret Agent" have both avoided appearing on this thread after an initial appearance by the Mr. Putman. Their decision not to respond to substantive questions and criticism of Bannon's claims in this venue constitutes a de facto refusal to comment on most changes I will make below.

II. Sources

Mr. Bannon first published some of his claims in the November/December 2001 issue of Kungfu Qigong, a magazine published by Pacific Rim Publishing which also publishes Kung Fu Magazine, and runs the Kung Fu Magazine internet forum. On pages 68 through 72, David Bannon, PhD first claims that he was an Interpol Officer, and that in 1998 he led a raid into a Florida hotel room rescuing a young girl who was being sexually abused and killing at least one perpetrator before rescuing "Annie" the 8 year old victim. This is almost exactly the same story that Bannon would later repeat in greater detail in his book "Race Against Evil" between pages 292 and 303.

In 2003, New Horizon Press published Bannon's book "Race Against Evil" and the first cluster of articles about Mr. Bannon appeared.

This included The Charlotte Observer, "Fighting Evil Was His Job", Olivia Fortson, February 6, 2003, Edition One-Three, page 1E, The Charlotte Observer, "Interpol: Bannon was not an Agent", Olivia Fortson, February 25, 2003, Edition One-Three, page 8E, Creative Loafing on February 26, 2003, http://tinyurl.com/bdh4z Then Lake Norman Times, "Controversial Child Advocate to sign book at Barnes and Noble", Jason Putnam (sic), February 2, 2004, Jason Putman "Kungfu Secret Agent: Agent for Interpol comes clean on his career as an assassin." http://tinyurl.com/btupx and Jason Putman and Professor Chiu Hse Yu "Interpol's Secret Army" for The Western Libertarian Alliance political journal. The issue in question can be downloaded in entirety (1.9 M) as a PDF file at http://www.westernlibertarian.org/p...20low%20res.pdf or go to http://www.westernlibertarian.org/paper and choose "WLA Complete". [SB or go to http://tinyurl.com/de2nb ]


III. The Story

Because this article will be disputing various assertions made by Mr. Bannon, I will review in length the claims made by Mr. Bannon in his book, and through other sources. I will particularly focus on various assertions which have been examined and found wanting.

In "Race Against Evil" (RAE) and other Bannon influenced articles, "Race" says [3] he arrived in South Korea as an eighteen, almost nineteen year old missionary for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (RAE, pp. 13) After entering this country sometime before May, 1981, he was swept up in mass student demonstrations against the South Korean Government.

"For four days from May 19 to 22, [1981] nearly 200,000 citizens and students clashed with military forces in Kwangju City. The students took over government offices and seized police stations and armories. On the same dates in 1980, an almost identical demonstration was staged. As if to commemorate the 1980 uprising, the bloody student riots were repeated in Kwangju in 1981. I was there." (RAE, pp. 19-20) . . . on May 22, paratroopers stormed the city and restored order at the cost of hundreds of deaths and thousands of wounded." (RAE, pp. 19-20)

During the riot after providing medical care for three days to wounded students Bannon says he was stabbed by a Korean student, approximately his age with a knife. Bannon kills this student and has his own life saved through "expert medical Attention". (RAE, pp. 23-24) After getting out of the hospital Bannon attends a reception at the United States Consulate where he meets two men who will greatly influence his life. Jacques Defferre of Interpol, and Dr. Kim Cholkyu, a Doctor who is described as being in "his mid-forties", having a "slight Boston accent", and Ivy League Education". Dr. Cholkyu is described as being the Director of "the South Korean National Medical Center in Seoul" (RAE, pp. 25, 26, 72, 186). Together they try to recruit him from missionary work to working for Interpol. At this time Bannon refuses this request.

Three months after the riot, (Approximately August, 1981) a fellow missionary named Todd got Bannon involved in petty black market activities. (RAE, pp. 29) Eventually while exchanging a crate of Jack Daniels with some Korean seamen, the deal goes sour, and Bannon and his friend Hyung-Jin injure these men while defending themselves against an attack with weapons. They are caught by the police, and Bannon is thrown into Taejon Prison. (See RAE, pp. 41-44) After some harrowing hand to hand combat behind bars, and approximately three months behind bars (RAE, pp. 44-45, 49-50) Jacques Defferre gets Bannon out in exchange for Bannon's agreement to work as an informer for Interpol tracking child molesters in Marseilles, France. (RAE, pp. 53) "Together we will serve Interpol and do great things." (RAE, p. 57)

Lots of perpetrators die in "Race Against Evil", starting with an American child pornographer named "Skip" who Defferre shoots in front of Bannon in Marseilles. (RAE, p. 66) Bannon the returns to South Korea for some psychological testing with the previously mentioned Dr. Kim Cholkyu, which breaks down into some truly inspired psycho-babble. (RAE, pp. 72-75) This seems intended to show that Bannon is a protector of the innocent. Then it's off to France, where Defferre conducts some preliminary firearms training in Paris and Bannon discovers he is unable to hit a target with a pistol. "I sucked in Paris and never improved." (RAE, p. 77) But because of his previous Hapkido training, Defferre gets Bannon a cover assignment teaching hand to hand combat to the Belgian rookie Gendarmerie as a Formateur Maitrise de la Violence. They give him the rank of Major because all the other instructors are majors (RAE, p. 80) and Bannon has a picture of him wearing what is presumably one of their hats in the picture section of his book.

Shortly thereafter Bannon meets Sidelle Rimbaud, who works for the French Direction de Surveillance du Territoire (DST). (RAE, p. 91) She becomes his girlfriend and fiancee. In October 21, of an un-named year, (RAE, 129) Sidelle and her DST team were staking out North Korean terrorists in Marseilles who were dealing drugs and kiddie porn to raise money to pay for future activities. Sidelle is shot through a Kevlar vest with a Teflon bullet and dies. Bannon, by his own account, is beside himself, he buys her a big monument stone and funeral, and then torchs the villa they lived in together (RAE p. 133, don't ask me why he turned firebug). Later in his book Bannon mentions that she is buried in a small cemetery in La Treille, France, which is outside Marseilles, France. (RAE, pp. 280-282.) He even prints a picture of her gravestone in his book. On the stone one can see the name "Rimbaud".

It is at this point that Defferre recruits Bannon into "Archangel". Archangel is a super secret organization within Interpol that supposedly existed between 1979 and 1991 under the command of Commissaire Jacques Defferre. Defferre was supposedly motivated by his own uncle molesting him between the ages of 5 and 14 and taking pictures, "I search for them every day" (RAE, p. 151) Jacques recruits "cleaners" from across the globe and trains them in a warehouse in La Verpillere "20 minutes from the center of Lyon" (RAE, p. 136) Archangel had "plenty" of cash (RAE, p. 154) even though the published budget of Interpol is twenty million euros a year. (Bannon says this is approximately $20 million US) (RAE, p. xv)

So let the killing begin. After training at Verpillere for several months, Bannon first travels to Ceausesu's Romania where he kills two child molesters in an alley, one by stabbing him, the other with a blow to the throat using the butt of his knife. (RAE p. 158) Romania is a police state, but the Securitate officer tailing him just happens to work for Archangel and then adopts this child. (RAE, p. 161) Bannon then kills a child molester named Jergens who was living on the tenth floor of the Byron Hotel in the Baywater section of London. (RAE, p. 6) Bannon gets into the room by pretending to be interested in distributing child porno for Jergens, incapacitates him, and then tortures him to death. Bannon films the event with Jergen's own video camera to record all the information that Jergen's divulges about his child pornography contacts. He even discovers Jergens murdered the son of one of his fellow assassins named Margaret. (RAE, pp. 163-165)

The stories grow more improbable with each passing chapter. Bannon additionally tells us about having to kill one of his former friends, lovers, and co-workers named Eunmi. This plot twist comes about when Bannon discovers that not only is she a North Korean secret agent but that she is trying to blow up the South Korean ANSP offices at Mt. Nam, South Korea. He catches her right when she is about set off a car bomb at this location, stabs her, and then is knocked out by two North Korean secret agents who are skilled enough to smuggle him to a torture camp in North Korea but not evidently competent enough to set off the car bomb.. (RAE, p. 252) Then there are some horrific torture and murder scenes in a North Korean prison camp before Interpol and the South Koreans finally managed to trade an North Korean agent for him. (RAE, pp. 253-261) They were able to figure out it was Bannon in captivity in North Korea because when they found Eumi's body "Hapkido knife work has a unique signature" (RAE, p. 263)

Bannon says in his book that he returned to the United States in 1991 after Archangel had been disbanded and he then left for Korea to earn a PhD (RAE, p. 288). Thereafter he was called back to duty at various times including in 1996 when Defferre lost his last assassin Margaret, and Bannon helped him kill seven perpetrators including some in the United States. (RAE, pp. 290-292) Then in 1998 "My past and present finally clashed". (RAE, p. 292)

According to Bannon in July of 1998 he was sent to "a small town in Florida" to watch a group of suspects in a multistory hotel as part of the Global "Wonderland" club raids. (RAE, pp. 293, 294) Waiting for a series of internationally coordinated arrests scheduled from August 31, to September 1, 1998 Bannon and a team from "the International Criminal Police Organization (ICPO-Interpol), the U.S. Department of Justice National Central Bureau of Interpol (USNCB)" and local law enforcement staked out two Koreans, a Thai and Four American Males, who were in a multistory hotel in a small town. (RAE, pp. 293, 294)

One day Bannon was waiting in their monitoring station with "Behavioral Scientist" Toni G. Brynes PhD, M.D. (RAE, pp. 294, 306) whom Bannon claims "had been consulting with the FBI's Baltimore Field Division's Innocent Images National Initiative (IINI), a component of the Crimes Against Children (CAC) Program, designed to track and apprehend online child pornographers.

On the afternoon of Sunday, August 30, 1998 the surveillance equipment in the perpetrator's suite picked up noises and conversation indicating that the Koreans had captured an eight year old little girl and were sexually abusing her. Against orders to wait Bannon ran to this suite leaving his pistol behind. He used a key card to enter the room. The man guarding the door pulled out a pistol and Bannon stabbed him in the neck with a Ka-Bar knife. The Sheriff's deputies who entered the room directly behind Bannon shot two of the remaining men in the room who had drawn firearms. (RAE, pp. 295-297)

In the bedroom Bannon found the Thai behind a camcorder tripod, "loud music filled the room." lay the naked victim and two Koreans. When the camera man swung the tripod at Bannon, Bannon hit him in the left knee with a telescoping baton, this assailant lost his balance and "the heavy end of tripod, with the camera attached, fell on his skull." One of the Koreans on the bed tossed a chair out the window and was attempting to crawl out the window when he slit his neck on the jagged window edge. After ministering to the victim named "Anne", this eight year old was taken to the local hospital by Emergency Medical Services. Her parents and teenage brother were waiting for her there. Afterward Bannon was reprimand by Interpol for disobeying orders, however he pulled some strings through Annie's father and the two local deputies who had been suspended were reinstated and given commendations. (RAE, pp. 297-299, 301-302).

According to semi-official Bannon biographer Jason Putman in his article "Kungfu Secret Agent" four of the seven pornographers were killed that day, and this information was corroborated by New Orleans Police Officer Thomas Parker who was president at the incident. (See footnote two).

IV The Truth

A) An Introduction, the CBI says Bannon's Chronology is False.

According to research conducted by the Colorado Bureau of Investigation while preparing an arrest warrant, executed against Mr. Bannon on January 27, 2006 the following is true.

David "Race" Bannon was born David Wayne Dilley on April 22, 1963 and officially changed his name to David Dilley Bannon in Spokane Washington in 1990. (Arrest Warrant, page 3, see image below). When Investigator Robert Brown interviewed Bannon's ex wife, one Susan Schneider, she provided the following information. She had been born in 1962 and "met Bannon in 1983 at Brigham Young University located in Salt Lake City, Utah." They lived together and married in 1985. "During the course of their marriage Bannon and Schneider attended community colleges in Spokane, Washington and were the caretakers for a mortuary until 1989." They had one child together who was born in 1988. "Between 1983 and 1989 Schneider and Bannon were only apart for brief periods of time." They changed their last names from Dilley to Bannon in Spokane Washington in 1990. "They selected Bannon because of the character Race Bannon in the cartoon Johnny Quest." (Arrest Warrant, page 4, see image below).

"In 1990 Schneider and Bannon separated [and] Schneider moved to South Carolina. Bannon told Schneider that he was moving to Korea to teach English. Three months later, Bannon showed up in South Carolina where he remained near his wife and daughter until 1995" when they divorced. "From 1995 to the present Bannon has kept in close contact with his child and ex-wife," and currently lives in Charlotte, North Carolina. His ex-wife told an investigator that Bannon "has a fascination with comic books and more specifically hero figures in cartoons . . . regularly attending comic book collector conventions." (Arrest Warrant, pages 4-5, see image below).

Schneider then told Brown, "that in her opinion it would be impossible for Bannon to have been an Interpol agent / assassin and a graduate of Busan National University without her knowledge due to their marital relationship. According to Schneider, Bannon is a habitual liar and that is what led to the end of their marriage." For example, at one point, "Bannon told Schneider that his father had passed away and that he needed to make funeral arrangements, when in fact, Schneider called the parent's residence and learned that [Bannon's] father was still alive." Additionally while Bannon has claimed that a scar on his back came from being knifed during a riot in Kwangju, South Korea in 1981, "Schneider told CBI Agent Kristen Gregg that Bannon does have a scar on his back, however Bannon told her that scar resulted from a kidney operation." (Arrest Warrant, pages 5, see image below).

With their research Colorado Bureau of Investigation essentially destroyed the chronology that Bannon claims for his life from 1983 onward. Bannon will probably accuse the CBI of being a tool of Interpol and his ex-wife of having lied repeatedly during their investigation. However our investigation at Bullshido had found multiple glaring holes in Mr. Bannon's story that are too serious to be accidental. Let's start at the beginning in South Korea where Bannon alleges he was stabbed, later imprisoned, and then recruited by Interpol. The next section will be lengthy but please bear with me, I'm trying to prove something did not happen which is more tedious then proving something did happen.

B) The Korean Riot That Never Was

On pages 19-20 of "Race against Evil: The Secret Missions of the Interpol Agent Who Tracked the World's Most Sinister Criminals-A Real Life Drama", (New Horizon Press, Far Hills, N.J. 2003). David 'Race' Bannon writes the following:

"That spring, South Korea was tormented by mass student demonstrations against the repressive government. An emergency decree banned all political activities and dissolved all political parties. For four days from May 19 to 22, nearly 200,000 citizens and students clashed with military forces in Kwangju City. The students took over government offices and seized police stations and armories. On the same dates in 1980, an almost identical demonstration was staged. As if to commemorate the 1980 uprising, the bloody student riots were repeated in Kwangju in 1981. I was there."

Later on page 24, Bannon writes:

"Later that night, on May 22, paratroopers stormed the city and restored order at the cost of hundreds of deaths and thousands of wounded . . . Though not as terrible as the 1980 tragedy that saw the slaughter of nearly 2,500 students--and which is commemorated each year in South Korea--that bloody spring was violent enough."

According to Bannon, his presence at this riot in 1981 changed his life in the following way. He was stabbed by a Korean male who he then had to kill with his bare hands. (p. 23) After going to the hospital to be treated, Bannon came to the attention of Jacques Defferre of Interpol, who eventually recruited him into this organization. (pp. 25-28) Thus Bannon was then able to meet and romance a French DST Agent, kill many child molesters, and eventually write a book about his exploits.

There is one "small" problem with this story. There does not appear to have been a riot in Kwangju in 1981 making Bannon's account historically impossible. The evidence for this assertion is the following.

1) The New York Times was closely following the violence in Kwangju in 1980 and wrote multiple articles about resistance to the government, and resistance in this city in particular, in late May, 1980. See:

a) James P. Sterba, "Seoul Vows New Restrictions Won't Delay Democracy", New York Times, Monday, May 19, 1980, p. A3. "In the Southern city of Kwangju, however, about 5,000 students defied the new Government decrees and battled riot policemen and troops in the streets for several hours before a a 9 P.M. curfew was imposed. Scores of students and policemen were reported injured."

b) James P. Sterba, "New Repression in South Korea: Growing Clampdown By General Curbing Democratic Reform" New York Times, Tuesday May 20, 1980, p. A3. and "5 Believed Dead in Clashes in Southern Korean City" p. A3. (Author not named) This second article says "tens of thousands of anti-government demonstrators reportedly clashed today in the southwestern city of Kwangju with riot policemen and armed paratroops. At least five bodies were seen lying in the streets, dozens of people were wounded and many students were arrested according to reports from witnesses."

c) Henry Scott Stokes, "Cabinet Resigns In South Korea as Riots Grow: More Deaths Reported in Huge Kwangju Protest", New York Times, Wednesday, May 21, 1980, pp. A1 and A8. "Reports from Kwangju, a stronghold of Kim Dae Jung, the arrested opposition leader, said that a television and radio station was burned as 30,000 demonstrators, mainly students and workers, marched in groups and some that battled a division-strength army unit that was rushed to the city when troubles began there. [The Associated Press reported from Seoul that the troops in Kwangju opened fire Wednesday on demonstrators who were trying to drive commandeered buses and armored personnel carriers at them, killing at least three, according to witnesses. The report said that as many as 200,000 people surged through the streets of Kwangju in the fourth straight day of protest against martial law. In rioting Tuesday, the agency said, up to 11 persons were killed, 13 buildings were wrecked and 50 vehicles burned.]"

d) Shim Jae Hoon, "Protesters Control South Korean City; At Least 32 Killed", New York Times, Thursday May 22, 1980, A1, A13, "Kwangju, South Korea, May 21 -- Tens of thousands of demonstrators, many waiving seized rifles, iron bars, axes, pitchforks and even light machine guns, took control of this southwestern city today, the fourth day of anti-Government rioting that has cost the lives of at least 32 people." A1.

e) Shim Jae Hoon, "Unsuccessful Truce Talks Held in South Korean City", New York Times, Friday, May 23, 1980, p. A8. "With armed rebellion continuing in the Southern part of South Korea, representatives of the anti-government demonstrators holding the city of Kwangju met with the local commander today in an unsuccessful attempt to agree upon a truce."

f) "30,000 in South Korea Continuing Kwangju Protests Despite Warning", New York Times, Sunday, May 25, 1980, p. 1, 6. The NYT reprinted an article by United Press International on their front page.

g) Henry Kamm, "Seoul Seems to Plan A Move On Kwangju: Foreigners Advised to Leave City", New York Times, Monday, May 26, 1980, A6.

h) Henry Kamm, "South Korea Troops Recapture Kwangju In Predawn Strike: Military Says 2 Were Killed in Light Resistance and 200 Arrested -- 4 Soldiers Are Injured", New York Times, Tuesday, May 27, 1980, A1, A16 [SB Note: these figures are very low].

i) Henry Scott Stokes, "When Troops Finally Came, Kwangju Revolt Became a Rout", New York Times, Wednesday, May 28, 1980, A1, A6. "Local people say 261 people died during the uprising and 2,000 were injured." A6.

j) Henry Scott Stokes, "Korean Military Hunting Leaders of City's Revolt: Army Sets Up Roadblocks in the Area of Kwangju", New York Times, Thursday, May 29, 1980, A14.

The point of citing these articles is as follows. One does not have a multiple day, total city riot with hundreds of fatalities in an industrial nation, without some mention in the international press.

2) However when I reviewed the New York Times from May 18, 1981 to May 31, 1981 I only found two articles that mentioned Kwangju. These were:

a) In a section entitled "Around the World" New York Times, Friday, May 22, 1981 the NYT reprinted the following headline and two paragraphs. "30 Priests in South Korea End 3-Day Hunger Strike. Seoul, South Korea, May 21 (UPI) -- Thirty Roman Catholic priests ended a three day hunger strike today after the authorities promised to accept their demands for the release of 23 people jailed for involvement in last year's violent Kwangju uprising, a Catholic official says." In the second paragraph there was no mention of any violent protest, or even mass gathering occurring in Kwangju on the anniversary of the 1980 riots.

b) On Wednesday, May 27, 1981 the New York Times printed an article by Mike Tharp entitled "A Year After Korean Uprising, Chun's Grip is Firm". (A2) The article said "Last week there were demonstrations at several universities, but both witnesses and the police described them as minor." The article did not mention any demonstrations or riots occurring in Kwangju, (they happened in Seoul) but did mention the hunger strike by Roman Catholic priests in this city.

So the question becomes, did the New York Times somehow miss a riot in Kwangju which lasted from May 18, to May 22, 1981 and in which to quote Bannon, "paratroopers stormed the city and restored order at the cost of hundreds of deaths and thousands of wounded". This impossibly unlikely because:

3) A review of all editions of the Wall Street Journal and Christian Science Monitor printed between May 18, 1981 and May 31, 1981 do not mention ANY civil disturbance in South Korea. and:

4) A review of the Times (of London) from May 18, 1981 to May 31, 1981 reveals only two articles concerning demonstrations in South Korea.

a) Jacqueline Reditt, "Women Protesters Occupy US centre in S. Korea", The Times, Saturday, May 23, 1981, p. 7. "Nine South Korean women staged a 22 hour sit-in at the American cultural centre in the south western provincial capital of Kwangju yesterday." The story concluded with the information that the South Korean police had removed the women without injury from the cultural center and took them to their homes.

b) Jacqueline Reditt, "Police Move Into Seoul University", The Times, Saturday, May 29, 1981, p. 9. In this report Reditt writes that Riot police broke up a student demonstration at Seoul National University for the second straight day on May 28, 1981. They used "pepper fog chemicals" and one student "screaming slogans denouncing President Chun plunged to his death from the fifth floor of the library building." There was not mention in this article of any more disturbances in Kwangju or that the police directly killed any students in Seoul.

So not only the American but also a highly respected British Newspaper fails to mention this 1981 riot in Kwangju in which Bannon claims there were "hundreds of deaths". Since Jacqueline Reditt was filing reports from Seoul at this time, and was aware of even a small nine women sit-in in Kwangju, it seems impossible that she and the Times of London would miss a four day replay of the 1980 riots in Kwangju.

C) The Fiancee That Never Was

Much of Bannon's story is built around his claimed relationship in the early 1980s with one "Sidelle Rimbaud," who worked for the French Direction de Surveillance du Territoire (DST). (RAE, p. 91) She becomes Bannon's girlfriend and fiancee. However in October 21, of an un-named year, (RAE, 129) Sidelle and her DST team were staking out North Korean terrorists in Marseilles who were dealing drugs and child pornography. . Sidelle was shot and killed and Bannon buys her a big monument stone and funeral, (RAE p. 133). Later in his book Bannon mentions that Sidelle is buried in a small cemetery in La Treille, France, which is outside Marseilles, France. (RAE, pp. 280-282.) He prints a picture of her gravestone in his book. On the stone one can see the name "Rimbaud". Similarly we know the date if not the year of the supposed shootout because when Bannon later delivers orchids to her grave he writes "It was close to the anniversary of her death. She had died on October 21, now it was the eighth of November." (RAE, 282).

I first contacted the French Embassy in Washington DC and asked if they could find out if there was ever a DST agent named Sidelle Rimbaud who had died in the line of duty. My initial contact person was Amaury Laporte at 202-944-6061. On 6-21-04 the French Embassy sent me the following e-mail from Info.Washington-AMBA@diplomatie.gouv.fr

"Dear Mr. Browning:

Thank you for contacting the Press and Information Office in Washington DC. Here is the written account of the voicemail I left this morning.

I contacted a DST employee this morning and she did not find any Sidelle Rimbaud in DST files.

To obtain a death certificate, please write a letter to state the demand and make sure to write the first name and the last name of the deceased, as well as the date of her death. Send the letter to: Direction des Operations Funebres, 380 rue St. Pierre, 13005 Marseille. Please make your demand in French if possible as few people speak English in the department.

Hope this helps. Do not hesitate to contact us if you need further assistance.

Cordialement/Regards,
Service de Presse et d'Information/ Press & Information Office
Ambassade de France / Embassy of France
Washington, D.C."

This e-mail was composed by one of Laporte's employees who did not leave her name on the e-mail but yes it is genuine and I would be happy to sign an affidavit to confirm that I did indeed receive this communication from the French Embassy.

Next is the text of the affidavit sent to me by Pierre-Olivier Mathe, my investigator in France. I will be happy to have a copy of this document sent to anyone who cares to provide me with their real name and address. This offer even extends to "Race" as long as he first answers a few select questions.

"My name is Pierre-Oliver Mathe, and my address is 2 Rue Bueno Carriero, 131100.Aix-En-Providence (France). I am 18 years old and I believe in the obligations of an oath. I make the following statement of my own free will and swear to its accuracy.

1) On November 5, 2004 I went to Marseille, and La Treille, France to discover if Sidelle Rimbaud is buried in La Treille.

2) While in Marseille I first went to St. Pierre Cemetery to access the archives since La Treille is a very small village just outside Marseille. There is only one cemetery in La Treille, and no one stationed there to take care of it. I called the Marseille town hall to inquire about the cemetery in La Treille and they indicated its location.

3) While at St. Pierre, I first tried to locate Sidelle Rimbaud using a date of death of October 21, 1981. She is not registered in a Marseille Cemetery on that date. Then I looked in the archives for every year from 1980 to 1985 in both the St. Pierre and La Treille Cemeteries and her burial is not registered in either location. I then tried to find her tomb or the burial plot but no David Bannon was registered as owning any such burial plot. A staff member at St. Pierre also showed me the list of everyone who was buried in La Treille and the name Sidelle Rimbaud was not on this list.

4) Then took a bus ride to La Treille, where David Bannon claims his former fiancee Sidelle Rimbaud is buried. I had a copy of the picture you provided me from Mr. Bannon's book which he claims is a picture of Sidelle Rimbaud's gravestone or monument. There are only about fifty graves in this cemetery and there is no monument which matches the picture you provided me. The La Treille cemetery is named Cimetiere de la Treille and is located at the following street address: Route de la Treille.

Pierre-Oliver Mathe"

*The original document was sworn and notarized*

I later asked Pierre to go check the newspaper morgue for reports of Sidelle's death or the murder of Bannon's mentor Jacques Deferre. Coincidently enough, Deferre is no longer alive to be interviewed. According to Jason Putman:

"In May 2003, Defferre and Bannon flew to France to Meet with U.S. and European intelligence officials . . . U.S. Intelligence officials agreed to meet with Defferre on May 11, 2003 and exchange excerpts of the documents for protection. The night before they were to deliver the goods, three officers broke into Bannon and Defferre's hotel room to steal the documents and confronted them. During the struggle, two of the three attackers were killed and the third fled. Bannon was left badly injured, with a dislocated knee and three cracked ribs. Crawling over to Defferre's crumpled body, Bannon found the 67 year old master spy, his friend of 20 years, was dead.

'Bannon called me and I could barely hear him,' Wolper recalls. [Henri Wolper is supposedly a Captain in the DST] 'He needed a team of washer/dryers.' Wolper sent a group of clean-up specialists and rushed Bannon to a medical facility to reset his knee. The next day, he personally chauffeured him to the all-important meeting. Since then, Bannon's safety has been guaranteed by the information he supplied - and the 256 pages of documents he has carefully hidden across three countries as insurance." [See footnote 2] In an article "Interpol's Secret Army" by Chiu Hsu Yu PhD and Jason Putman, Western Libertarian Alliance, Election Cycle Summer 2004, pp 1, 19, on page 19 the Putman written article says "Three unidentified men confronted them in Marseilles".

So Defferre was allegedly killed in Marseilles on, or about, May 10, 2003. However in Pierre Oliver Mathe's December 12, 2005 affidavit he makes the following statements under oath.

"1) On page 129 and 282 of his book 'Race Against Evil', David Bannon indicates his former fiancee and Direction de la Surveillance du Territorire agent, Sidelle Rimbaud, was killed in a shootout with North Korean terrorists on October 20, in Marseille, France. He does not provide the year of this event.

2) On October 23, 2005 I went to 'La bibliotheque Mejanes (Cite du Livre) a public library in Aix-en-Providence and reviewed the back issues of 'Le Provencal', a local newspaper based in Marseille which is considered to be the most reliable newspaper in Marseille, France. I reviewed this newspaper's editions for the dates of October 20, 21, 22 and 23 during the following years: 1980, 1981, 1982, 1983, 1984, 1985, 1986, and 1987. I was unable to find any reference to a DST agent named Sidelle Rimbaud or any other law enforcement officer being killed on these dates in Marseille. There was also no mention of any shootouts between North Korean terrorists and the Direction de la Surveillance et du Territoire, Interpol, or Marseille police.

3) On this same date I also reviewed this same newspaper's editions from May 9, through May 15, 2003 for any mention of the homicide of Jacques Deferre or any mention of Mr. Deferre or any other individuals being killed in a hotel room in Marseille, France. Once again I found no such record of such an event."

Now there is an error or typo in the Affidavit since Bannon says Sidelle was killed on October 21 not October 20. However since Pierre searched the newspaper for dates from October 20 through October 23 during eight straight years and found nothing, this did not prevent him from surveying the days on which Sidelle's death would have been reported in the Newspaper. Since "the ambulance [took] Sid to the Morgue" (RAE, p. 132) and Wolper and Bannon told Putman "Rimbaud's grave, and Directorate of Territorial Security plaque honoring her death in the line of duty, are in La Trelle, a small town in the hills behind Marseilles." [See Footnote Two, this comment is found in footnote eight of Putman's article] this was an overt death, not a covert event. Or as I would like to ask Bannon "You mean the DST kept this event out of the newspapers and still put up a public plaque commemorating her death?"

The lack of a grave for Sidelle Rimbaud where Bannon claims she is buried and Bannon bought a marker for her, the lack of newspaper articles confirming Rimbaud's or Deferre's death during the times there should have been such articles, indicate that Rimbaud is fabricated and Deferre did not die in Marseilles as claimed by Bannon and reported by Putman.

D) The Wrong Hat

In his book "Race Against Evil" Bannon reports that at some point before Sidelle's death (which would make it the early 1980s) Defferre had him assume a law enforcement cover identity.

"We drove to Brussels. During the trip Defferre explained my new legitimate life. 'You are now a major in the Belgian Gendarmerie. Your post is the Formateur Maitrise de la Violence.' I was the Close Quarter Battle Instructor for Rookie Gendarme. Easy job for someone of my background and the cover let me disappear when needed. But a major? Deffere grinned. 'Major Bannon has such a nice ring to it... And all the other instructors are majors,' he added, winking." (RAE, p. 80)

The first issue here is that this conversation is automatically inaccurate. Bannon would have been called "Major Dilley" since he did not change his name until 1990, at least according to the Colorado Bureau of Investigation. Secondly if he was to not use an alias in any position it would have been this instructorship since it was designed to provide him with "cover" for his more hidden activities. In the picture insert of his book there is a picture of a younger looking Bannon wearing a police hat with the caption, "As an Interpol operative under Defferre, Race used many covers, including being a member of the Belgian gendarmerie."

However when one of our Bullshido Belgian members "Lazy Tiger" did some checking he later posted on June 10, 2004 that:

"- I found a bit more info about the hat he’s wearing in the picture, I checked with two collectors.
One collector is a Belgian police officer ( http://www.policecollection.be/ ) [SB: or see http://tinyurl.com/7odqp ]

and with Claude Marchal who was the former curator of the international police museum (http://users.skynet.be/bs171567/CM1_2/INDEX.htm ). [SB: or see http://tinyurl.com/a9a2w ]

First I must explain something about the Belgian police, before 2001 the police was divided in[to] two major divisions. The gendarmerie and the Municipal Police (there where other departments like railroad police but this is not important in this case).

A huge difference was that the gendarmerie was under military command and had national jurisdiction.

In the picture Bannon is wearing an inspector’s hat from the municipal police not the gendarmerie. If he ever was a member of the gendarmerie this is not a mistake that he would have made, he would have known the difference.
The black shirt and tie is bullshit, as already said by LolodesBois the gendarmerie dresses in blue."

If Bannon was a major under any name when attached to the Gendarmerie why is he wearing an inspector's hat from the municipal police and offering it as proof of his membership in the Belgian Gendarmerie? In short this picture by itself indicates that Bannon made up his affiliation with this organization.

Article continued next post.

[1] (New Horizon Press, Far Hills, New Jersey, 2003)

[2] See Jason Putman "Kungfu Secret Agent: Agent for Interpol comes clean on his career as an assassin." http://tinyurl.com/btupx

[Sam Browning]

IV (continued)

E) The Murder That Wasn't

In his book David "Race" Bannon describes well over a dozen murders he participated in, many in locations like Romania which Bullshido has no way of confirming. Yet Bannon does open his book by telling the story of a "cleaning" also known as an assassination in London at an unnamed time. The information contained within the book indicates however that the murder would have occurred in the early to mid 1980s.

"Suites at the Byron Hotel in the Baywater section of London weren't cheap. Exquisite taste went hand-in-hand with an air of opulence and refinement. After a stroll in Kensington Gardens, I crossed Queensborough Terrace, straightened my tie, buttoned my grey suit and entered the country house hotel atmosphere of the Byron." (RAE, p. 3)

"Having arrived in London, I waited in the elegant hotel lobby for the elevator to take me to Jergen's room, then I walked down the tenth floor corridor." (RAE, p. 6) After being admitted into a room where the child pornographer named Jergens sat on a Queen-Anne style chair, "I stretched, leaning back to get a better view of the bedroom. Reasonable chance it was empty. (RAE, p. 7) 'Mind if I use the restroom?' I asked politely. He graciously pointed out the bathroom through the master bedroom. As I walked through I confirmed that the place was empty." (RAE, p. 8.) Then Bannon kills Jergens, horribly. This whole event takes up pages 3-10, 163-165, 167-168 in Bannon's book "Race Against Evil."

The problem is that a picture published of this hotel by Capricorn, see http://tinyurl.com/7f9u2 indicates a five story building not a ten story building as Bannon claims. "I walked down the tenth floor corridor."

So on February 21, 2005 I gave the Byron Hotel a call. They are located at 36/38 Queensborough Terrace, Bayswater, London W2 3SH, Telephone +44 20 7243 0997 and introduced myself to Ludmina, who answered the phone. "Hello I'm Samuel Browning and I'm a researcher from Norwich Connecticut, USA who is fact checking a book. In the book it says a homicide took place at your hotel in the 1980s, I think that's rubbish but do you have a long standing employee there, who has been there since the 1980s, whom I can talk to?"

Ludmina told me that I would have to talk to the reception manager who was in from 9 am to 2 pm. I thanked her for her time and then asked. "How many floors does the Byron have?" "Five" was her prompt reply. I laughed as I hung up the phone, if Bannon committed a murder on a non-existant 10th floor he would need flying skills similar to those displayed in the movie. "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon."

But since I had not gotten an airtight statement from the Hotel's management that a murder had never been committed at this hotel as described by Bannon, I asked Kickcatcher to go over and visit this hotel when he was in London on a business trip. While I will not reveal his real name here, his identity has been disclosed to the Colorado Bureau of Investigation and he has told them that he is willing to provide an affidavit concerning the following information if they wish.

Here is part of Kickcatcher's February 7, 2006 e-mail to me.

"The other news is more up your street: Byron hotel. I visited it today and had a good chat with the receptionist. She knew about your phone call so maybe it was her you spoke to. She didn’t want to be involved so I didn’t push your letter on her but I have got all the necessary evidence we hoped for so mission accomplished anyway.

She didn’t give her name but she said she’d been there 10 years and never heard of any murder. She said the maintenance man has been there 20 years and likewise never heard (latter part is hearsay).

The hotel definitely only has 6 floors including basement (Page 6 “then I walked down the tenth floor corridor”).

The hotel did not have ANY suites in the 1980s. They now have one but it is a recent conversion of two rooms (page 7 “the bedroom suite” and “leaning back to get a better view of the bedroom” and page 8 “through the Master bedroom”).

The bathroom/toilets of EVERY room and immediately adjacent to the main door as you go in, so even if he got the above to facts (10th floor & suite) wrong, he would have not had to pass the “bedroom” to access the toilet (Page 8 “he graciously pointed out the bathroom through the Master bedroom”).

I am happy to give the CBI a witness statement or whatever if it’s any use to them."

Several days earlier Kickcatcher had managed to obtain a statement from the Metropolitan Police Service concerning whether a murder had ever occurred at the Byron hotel during the time period implied by Bannon. A copy of the e-mail he received is quoted below.

"Subject: Alleged murder at the Byron Hotel
Date: Fri, 3 Feb 2006 16:27:52 -0000
From: David.Capus@met.police.uk Add to Address Book

To: [E-mail address removed by Samuel Browning]

Dear Mr. [Name removed by Browning]
I refer to your recent e-mail regarding an alleged murder at the Byron Hotel, Queensborough Terrace between 1979-1989.
On the information you have provided I have been unable to discover any records that relate to such a crime.
I regret that I am unable to assist you on this occasion.

Yours sincerely

David Capus
Metropolitan Police Service
Records Management Branch
20th Floor
Empress State Building
Lillie Road
London SW6 1TR"

Kickcatcher concluded that: "it is inconcievable that the police wouldn't record murders, nor that their records branch wouldn't be able to locate the file (especially an unsolved one, lol), I think we can safely say that the Metropolitan Police have no record of any murders taking place at that address during the 1980s. That's pretty damning."

I agree, the only confusion here is whether the basement of the Bryon hotel should be counted as a floor, but even if it is, The Byron hotel has only six floors, and no tenth floor for Bannon to kill child molesters on. The Metropolitan police do not have a record of this homicide at this address when they should have such a record and Bannon did not accurately describe the layout of rooms at this hotel, not even knowing that they did not have suites (a rental with more then one room, not counting the bathroom) at the time this supposed homicide took place.

F) The Mysterious Ph.D

David "Race" Bannon has repeatedly asserted that he has earned a Ph.D from a Korean University. This has been stated on his profile on his book jacket, and his book (RAE, p. 288). In footnote five of Jason Putman's article [] Putman states: "Bannon's qualifications were easy to confirm: Kim, Woo-Chul, Vice Chancellor for the Office of Academic Affairs at Seoul National University, confirmed that Bannon graduated with a doctral degree in history in 1994. 'The following year.' he added, 'his dissertation was given the Korean War Memorial Museum's Sejong Award for Excellence.' Kim also confirmed Bannon's master level degree in computer science."

So on July 19, 2004 I sent my original inquiry letter to Dean Woochul Kim Ph.D, Office of Academic Affairs, Seoul National University, Kwanak Campus Building, #60 4F, San 56-1, Sillim-dong, Gwanak-gu Swoul, 151-742, Korea by fax.

"Dear Dean Kim:

My name is Samuel Browning and I am an attorney writing from America. I am currently trying to confirm some assertions made by a writer named Jason Putman concerning an individual named David Bannon. David Bannon is an American who asserts that in 1994 he earned a Ph.D in History from your institution. He also claims that he has a master's degree, or equivalent of this degree, in computer science. Mr Putman who says he interviewed you, and quotes you as saying Bannon's "dissertation was given the Korean War Memorial Museum's Sejong Award for Excellence." I am interested in finding out the following:

1) Does Mr. Bannon have the academic degrees claimed by him from Seoul National University?
2) Did Putman quote you accurately?
3) If so, could you please tell me the title of Mr. Bannon's dissertation?

Additionally, I am also trying to locate on Lee Hyung-Jin, whom Mr. Bannon asserts earned a Ph.D from your university in the 1990s and is now teaching in South Korea. If you could tell me which university he is now teaching at I would be very greatful.

Thank you for your attention to this matter. Please accept my apologies for writing in English since I do not speak Korean. My professional address and e-mail is listed above. If you prefer, a reply can be faxed to the sending number I have borrowed.

Sincerely yours,

Samuel Pearce Browning Esq"

On July 29, 2004 I received the following e-mail back from vctm061@snu.ackr

"Dear Samuel Pearce Browning:

This is Seoul National University and I am Kim Minnah in Office of Registration. We cannot find any information about Mr. David Bannon, and I did not say what Mr. Putman quoted. Mr. David Bannon did not obtain Ph.D. degree from our school.

If you have any more questions, do not hesitate to contact us.

Sincerely yours,

Minn Ah, Kim
Registrar
The Division of Registrar
Seoul National University
E-mail: vctm061@snu.ac.kr
Tel : +82(2)880-5036
Fax: +82(2)879-2933"

Now a careful reading of the above e-mail indicates that Kim Minnah is mistaken in so far as she thought the quotes were attributed to her when they actually were attributed to Dean Woochul Kim Ph.D. However she is clear that no David Bannon has a Ph.D from her university. Once again an important assertion about Mr. Bannon does not check out.

G) The"Raid" that never happened in Florida

The climax of Bannon's book comes in August 31, 1998. According to Bannon in July of 1998 he was sent to "a small town in Florida" to watch a group of suspects in a multistory hotel as part of the Globel "Wonderland" club raids. (RAE, pp. 293, 294) Waiting for a series of internationally coordinated arrests scheduled from August 31, to September 1, 1998 Bannon and a team from "the International Criminal Police Organization (ICPO-Interpol), the U.S. Department of Justice National Central Bureau of Interpol (USNCB)" and local law enforcement staked out two Koreans, a Thai and Four American Males, who were in a multistory hotel in a small town. (RAE, pp. 293, 294)

On the afternoon of Sunday, August 30, 1998 Bannon was waiting in their monitering station with "Behavioral Scientist" Toni G. Brynes Ph.D, M.D. (RAE, pp. 294, 306) when the surveillance equipment in the perpetrator's suite picked up noises and conversation indicating that the Koreans had captured an eight year old little girl and were sexually abusing her. Against orders to wait Bannon ran to this suite leaving his pistol behind. He used a key card to enter the room. The man guarding the door pulled out a pistol and Bannon stabbed him in the neck with a Ka-Bar knife. The Sherriff's deputies who entered the room directly behind Bannon shot two of the remaining men in the room who had drawn firearms. (RAE, pp. 295-297)

In the bedroom Bannon found the Thai behind a camcorder tripod, "loud music filled the room." lay the naked victim and two Koreans. When the camera man swung the tripod at Bannon, Bannon hit him in the left knee with a telescoping baton, this assailant lost his balance and "the heavy end of tripod, with the camera attached, fell on his skull." One of the Koreans on the bed tossed a chair out the window and was attempting to crawl out the window when he slit his neck on the jagged window edge. After ministering to the victim named "Anne", this eight year old was taken to the local hospital by Emergency Medical Services. Her parents and teenage brother were waiting for her there. Afterward Bannon was reprimand by Interpol for disobeying orders, however he pulled some strings through Annie's father and the two local deputies who had been suspended were reinstated and given commendations. (RAE, pp. 297-299, 301-302).

According to semi-official Bannon biographer Jason Putman in his article "Kungfu Secret Agent" four of the seven pornographers were killed that day, and this information was corraborated by New Orleans Police Officer Thomas Parker who was president at the incident. So I decided to track down Thomas Parker, an Officer in the New Orlean's Police Department after reading the following:

"Some cops are less enthusiastic. 'I met two of these Interpol guys, okay?' says New Orleans police officer Thomas Parker. In August-September 1998 he worked on a global raid of Internet child pornographers called The Wonderland Club. 'I met two of these Interpol guys,' he recalls. 'One was obviously an ex-con, the other some sort of psychologist. At the time, we figured maybe they were CIA or whatever.' When they raided their suspects, Parker and the Interpol team stormed the room and killed four of the seven pornographers. Parker's 'ex-con' was Bannon. 'These guys, they don't take no prisoners,' Parker recalls. 'They ain't legit cops, they're killers.' The father of an 8-year-old girl that was rescued by Bannon and Parker supported the need for Archangel, but said the work 'cankers their souls.'” (footnote numbers removed by Samuel Browning)

http://tinyurl.com/btupx

According to footnote 26 of Putman's piece, he allegedly interviewed Parker on June 3, 2003 and described him as a police officer, not a retired police officer. When I called the New Orleans Police Department's Personnel Division (504-826-1400) on May 19, 2004 they told me that they did not currently have a police officer named Thomas Parker working as a full time, or part time reserve officer. They could not provide the name of retirees, so Parker could have retired between 6/3/2003 and 5/19/2004 but we were certainly off to a suspicious start. What was a New Orleans police officer doing in small town Florida when he wasn't a member of Interpol, or even a member of local law enforcement?

After running a lexis-nexus news search I could only find two Wonderland Club raids in Florida during August or September 1998. Customs Agents and local law enforcement officers however did seize hundreds of sexually explicit pictures of children from the home computer of a man from St. Augustine which is a town outside Jacksonville, Florida. No shooting, no arrests, (Just carrying out a search warrant)

See Kathleeen Sweeney, The Florida Times Union, Friday, September 4, 1998, "Kid porn traced to St. Johns; Pictures seized from computer B-1

If police had shot and otherwise killed four individuals during a raid, there should have been some public mention of this raid. Certainly it could not have been kept hidden from the media given the number of claimed deaths. Below is the only information I could find from the Miami Herald.

"September 3, 1998, Thursday

SECTION: Section A; Page 7, Column 1

LENGTH: 55 words

HEADLINE: MIAMI HOME AMONG THOSE RAIDED IN GLOBAL STRIKE ON CHILD PORN

BYLINE: BY JIM PUZZANGHERA

JOURNAL-CODE: MH

ABSTRACT:

Police seize computers around world and in 32 US communities, including Miami and Jacksonville, in coordinated crackdown on largest-ever clandestine network of child pornography; network members reportedly hid their activities with secret passwords and old KGB coding technology (M)"

Serving this search warrant must have been quite a low key event. If someone had died I suspect they could have worked this information into the headline.

We at Bullshido then tried to use the phone, and our our local connections to track down the location of this event. Asia, one of our administrators, spoke with his Uncle and his uncle's son. The uncle is a now retired Broward County Sheriiff CPT and Asia's cousin is still serving in the office. Asia asked them about the Wonderland Raids, Interpol involvement, shoot outs, etc. They echoed what the news report said. No killings just seized material.

On June 15, 2004 I called the Jacksonville, Florida Sherriff's Department and first talked to their record's division, they told me that they could not provide me with any reports re, fatalities during a police raid unless I knew the name of the suspects or victims which I did not. On their suggestion I contacted one of the media spokespeople for the department, Ken Jefferson, at 904-630-2133. After I explained that I was calling re Wonderland Club raid fatalities he asked what that was, so I explained the internet pornography angle and asked if there were any police raids on August 30, 1998 during which multiple fatalities occurred. Without doing a records search, he clearly replied that he had not heard of such an incident.

One newspaper account I read indicated that a wonderland search warrant was executed in St. Augustine Florida, a town not far from Jacksonville Florida. St. Augustine is policed by two separate agencies. So on June 17, 2004 I first called the Saint John County Sherriff's Department located at 4015 Lewis Speedway, St. Augustine Florida, 32084 (904-824-8304) and talked to Diana Bryant of their community affairs unit. When I told her about Bannon's claim that suspects were killed in a hotel or motel after a raid involving a search warrant, she went and talked to a Captain who had been with the department for "20 years" and she commented that she, and he had not heard of such a raid involving fatalities. Now onward to the St. Augustine Police Department.

The same day I called the Saint Augustine Police at 904-825-1070 and they sent me to their records division where I was referred to an officer only identified as Corporal Michelle (She only gave a first name) I asked about raids, search warrants, and officer involved shootings on August 30, 1998. Michelle responded that their department which was small, did not do search warrants and that they only had one officer involved shooting in 1998 and it involved a fugitive from California and a traffic stop. They had nothing that was similar to the hostage involved, multiple dead suspects in a hotel room situation, that was described in Bannon's book.

About this time I received a letter from Bullshido member Gringo Grande:

"Re: bannon
I spoke with Officer Del Castillo of the Miami County Police. According to him, we need a suspect name or DOB to be accurate but to the best of his knowledge and to other people in the room, they could not recall any incident of this nature (and you know Law Enforcement would remember something like this). The number is 305-471-1900.

Next I spoke with a female Officer...Officer Jacobsen (Jacobson?) at the Miami City Police. Officer Jacobsen remarked that she had been on the force long before this incident and is (obviously) still employed by them. She has never heard of any incident such as this...with or without the Wonderland name attached. She did say if it was a case under Federal jurisdiction that they would be the prime source of info regarding the case. Furthermore, Officer Jacobsen also said that a suspects name or DOB would enable her to lookup the requested info for sure. The number is 305-579-6420."

All of our other inquiries similarly went nowhere. I will hereby render the following opinion. This event never happened. It should have shown up in press coverage, especially since Race Against Evil indicates that this was a law enforcement operation not a covert hit. For example:

1) Right before Bannon storms the room he is told "Two CAC guys are on the way. Their informant is in the room so the U.S. Attorney says to hold off." (RAE, p. 296) At the end of the book one "Lee Hyung-Jin, Ph.D" of South Korea says that: "working for KNBC (Korean National Central Bureau of Interpol), my team participated in the transport and prosecution of a second Korean male arrested during the incident during the incident described in the Wonderland Chapter." (RAE, p. 307) While I would need this Korean's name to search Federal Court Records we are to believe this man was deported without any notice from the press despite the potentially high interest in this matter. This is suspicious since newspapers had already reported on several "Wonderland" search warrants executed in Florida.

2) The victim "Annie" was taken to the hopital in a EMS vehicle. Where she was met by her family. (RAE, p. 299) Obviously no one at the ambulance service or hospital talked to the press, and the press was not using a scanner to moniter police or EMS frequencies like they do around the country.

3) Two deputies who followed Bannon were suspended for two weeks with pay while an investigation was conducted. Bannon helped them out and they each were awarded citations. (RAE, p. 301, 302) The Press never found out about this either, and it wasn't mentioned by their department publically.

4) The four bodies seemingly disappeared. Under Florida law they should have been taken to the District Medical Examiners Office since criminal and unusual circumstances were involved. This would have been another place where the press could have learned of this police shooting. Since however, we don't have the names of the supposed dead I could not conclusively check to find if they had been examined by a particular ME's office.

In conclusion, if this incident happened as described, it should have been covered by the local media. When we contacted police departments where there was any indication that "Wonderland Club" search warrants had actually been executed, we found that they were unfamilar with this claimed incident. Had David Bannon, or his scribe Jason Putman, been willing and able to provide the name of the town in which this incident was alleged to have occured in 1998, it would have silenced critics like myself. If Bannon's story was true, no more then three phone calls would have been needed to confirm this story. Their refusal to respond to this, and other questions indicates bad faith on their part.

continued next post

[Sam Browning]

LOOSE ENDS

There are a number of loose ends to this investigation, but ones that generally speak badly for Mr. Bannon. I have been often specifically asked if he has made any comment on our work, and the answer is not directly, and not in print.

Secondly there are at least two people who we have tried to trace, Toni G. Brynes, Ph.D, M.D. who he claims was with him in Florida, and Chiu Hse Yu Ph.D, who supposedly wrote an article with Jason Putman. We have also attempted to confirm that Bannon scribe Mr. Putman is the about-to-be published author that he claims to be. Finally Bannon can't seem to describe firearms without making some embarrassing mistakes. We are not trained assassins, but given such gafts we have to ask if he actually received the expert training that he claims.

A) Dances With Mr. Putman and Mr. Bannon

On May 19, 2004 a thread was started by a woman named Stacy to on the Kung Fu Magazine forums to discuss David Bannon's claims, as recorded by Jason Putman. http://tinyurl.com/bpecp

On May 19, 2004, then Associate Publisher Gene Ching made the following post concerning Bannon and Putman. (See Post #4)

"I've invited both of them to respond on our secret agent thread. Putnam sent me a statement that he wanted me to post, but frankly, I'm not going to do that. If he feels the need to defend his work here on the forum, as with any of the freelance authors that submit to us, they can do that themselves. Putnam has yet to even sign up for membership. Bannon made the offer to discuss it when the original article came out on our print magazine down on our TC Media forum so he has a membership here that is still active and has also been notified about these threads.

Herein lies the power of the KFM forum, unlike any other martial arts magazine. We can discuss this directly with the authors, if they have the inclination. Both author Putnam and subject Bannon know about these threads, so now we watch and see..."

On May 19, 2004 Putman posted his first response to this controversy. See Post #12.

"As much as I'd love to accept any award for being the first to 'break' this story, readers will find in the detailed reference notes that the first major media venue to investigate and confirm Bannon's account was National Public Radio (NPR) last July in an exhaustive 30-min report on The Todd Mundt Show. Since then, the story has been investigated and confirmed by two newspapers (Charlotte Observer [31st largest metro in the U.S.] and a story I wrote for a much smaller paper, The Lake Norman Times) and most recently by Fox News Channel in a report that aired on March 24.

I have been researching this article, and other similar works, for over a year in preparation for my new book on the world's intelligence special forces, coming from Random House in 2005. My father is a retired DEA special agent in charge, so I've been around some pretty astounding things, although not from personal experience. My dad vouched for Bannon and Defferre; and then he vouched for me when I pursued all the interviews.

The heart of the article, 'Kungfu Secret Agent,' is the volume of interviews. I spoke in person and via phone with law officers, intelligence officers and Interpol agents, all of whom worked with Bannon. I interviewed Bannon's Interpol supervisor, Jacques Defferre, in person before the gentleman's death. Some of the interviewees didn't care for Bannon, others spoke of him with long years between them, but all confirmed the existence of Team Archangel and that they had worked with Bannon and Defferre. Bannon's book, 'Race Against Evil,' has been confirmed as accurate and credible by intelligence and law officers with whom he worked. The interviews are detailed in the article and speak for themselves.

Bannon himself wrote his first account for Kungfu Magazine in 2001, as Gene has noted, and then told the full story in his book from New Horizon, which was fully vetted by the attorneys of the book's distributor, Penguin-Putnam (no relation, darnit). My own publisher is repeating the vetting process, checking all of my tapes, transcripts, contact information and support documentation -- as would be required by any major media venue. As with all journalism, the interview tapes and transcripts, as well as full contact information, are held by my book publisher.

Bannon currently serves as an expert witness on global human trafficking for federal appellate courts in Florida, Pennsylvania and Washington, D.C. I confirmed this with two law firms that have hired him as an expert consultant - both of whom have independently verified his credentials and background with Interpol before putting him on the stand to testify. This corroboration is hard to refute or deny.

If my writing style isn't up to Kungfu standards, or if I have dramatized in a way that readers find distracting, I accept full blame. It should not reflect poorly on the hundreds of Interpol officers who shed blood and sweat and years defending children. The sacrifices of Team Archangel were too dear to be dismissed because of my flaws as a writer.

When I interviewed Bannon and Defferre together, I was struck by their normalcy - so remarkably normal that it was almost abnormal - it was easy to miss them, to let your eyes slide over them and onto someone else in the coffee shop. Only after talking with them in detail did I begin to sense the remarkable depths of quiet violence in both men. After Defferre was killed, and with much investigation, I have concluded that Bannon revealed his story as a safety measure that has little to do with book sales. Going public, but retaining support docs, he has been able to leave what Defferre (with characteristic panache) called 'the secret world.'

Bannon himself has a much deeper motivation and when he discusses it, his demeanor is one of unwavering resolve and dignity. Bannon is a child advocate and his book is secondary to spreading the world about what he calls "this most horrific atrocity," child sex trafficking. After talking with these men in person, all of the subsequent support docs and confirming interviews served to increase my own horror at the sheer volume of children abused in sex trafficking -- and to begin to understand in part the immense frustration of men like Defferre that ultimately led to a Team Archangel.

Much of my research was assisted by Professor Chiu Hse Yu of Singapore University, with whom I co-wrote "Interpol's Secret Army" for The Western Libertartian Alliance political journal. Bannon also has an article in the same issue, 'The Hidden Slavery: Global Sex Trafficking,' which - true to his character - mentions nothing about his own book. The issue in question can be downloaded in entirety (1.9 M) as a PDF file at
http://tinyurl.com/de2nb
or got to http://www.westernlibertarian.org/paper and choose "WLA Complete".
Professor Chiu's web site (and contact address) is: http://tinyurl.com/7oss8

I am pleased to correspond with anyone who has read Bannon's book and done the hard research needed to qualify their findings--including, of course, the year I've spent gathering interviews, photos, and support documentation that confirm undeniably the facts of this article.

Thank you for reading the article and offering your comments. I hope I have addressed your concerns.

Jason Putman
http://www.geocities.com/JasonPutmanwrites [SB: or http://tinyurl.com/82qut ]
JasonPutmanwrites@yahoo.com"

On May 24, 2004 in Post #23 Gene Ching wrote:

"OK, so it's not settled...

...I'm working on getting Dr. Bannon to post. More to come..."

This is further evidence that Bannon had notice of this thread and the questions being raised about his story.

In Post #27 made on May 25, 2004, Bullshido Administrator Asia confirmed that his two relatives in the Broward County Sherriff's Office had never heard of fatalities resulting from the Wonderland search warrants. Neither Putman or Bannon would ever respond to this point.

On May 28, 2004 I made Post #55

"Dealing with Putman

As Mr. Putman requested in his post I first e-mailed him some questions and he then mailed me back what was described in its title as a consultancy agreement and which I promptly erased by accident. Since I don't wish to pay Mr. Putman so that he can answer questions, here is a copy of the letter I sent him and perhaps he can answer the questions here.

'Dear Mr. Putman:

My name is Samuel Browning and I am writing because I am very skeptical about Mr. Bannon's claims and thought you could provide some additional information that I could use to confirm parts on his account. In his book Bannon claimed on on August 30, 1998 that he was part of a "Wonderland Club" police and Interpol raid in which multiple suspects were killed. I have done a nexus/lexis search of florida newspapers from August and September and have found that there were only two "Wonderland Club" raids in Florida and one was in Jacksonville Florida and the other was in Miami Florida. No deaths were reported from either raid. Since this was an overt law enforcement operation rather than a covert hit, the existance of deaths would have been publically revealed. Could you please tell me in which town or city in which this raid occurred so I can contact the local authorities and confirm that this incident actually happened?

I've also called the New Orleans Police Department and they told me that they do not have a New Orleans Police Officer named Thomas Parker. Can you please tell me which command he works out of so I can contact him through an official NOPD number?

Finally could you please tell me the date and city in which Jacques Defferre was killed so I can confirm his death?

Thank you for your time.

Samuel Browning'

Since this time I have also done a lexis search for David Bannon's name in the published decisions of the Federal District Courts and Federal Circuit Courts of America (01/01/1990 to 05/25/2004) and turned up absolutely nothing. Will Mr. Putnam identify the case names, their docket numbers, and the court's in question and I will call the appropriate clerk's offices to try to confirm his story?"

On June 2, 2004 in Post #67 Mr. Putman made what would be his final response on the Kung-fu Magazine forum. Please notice that he never addressed any questions I or anyone else asked. Notice as well that in Post #12 he had invited people to contact him with their questions without mentioning the need to provide credentials suitable to his satisfaction.

"Kungfu Forum:

Thank you again for reading "Kungfu Secret Agent" and offering your comments and insights.

As a feature story for a popular magazine, the article was designed to inform, not to convince. The material was not presented as a research paper nor as a technical analysis of combat tactics. To those who enjoyed the brief article, thank you; to those who did not enjoy it, there are many worthy articles in Kungfu Magazine.

Below is an exchange from one "Samuel Browning." Mr. "Browning" is a member of this forum and presents himself as an attorney. During our brief correspondence, Mr. "Browning" did not display verifiable credentials and a legitimate professional interest, and without a consultation agreement, I am unable to offer him more of my time.

Indeed, it is difficult to offer this response to an anonymous writer who does not even provide the courtesy of an email answer to my letter, instead choosing the ethically dubious option of posting said correspondence in a public forum. I herein follow his preferred method of communication.

To others who are kindly interested in my work, please understand that there are many calls upon my time in activities that help pay my bills.

Please also understand that confidential sources are the very real means of my livelihood and are not volunteered easily to idle curiosity. It took a year to identify which names and places in Bannon's account were changed to protect innocent victims--Bannon plainly discusses the reasons for these changes in the beginning of his book.

Therefore, it is reasonable to expect that a number of the names and places identified in the book are pseudonyms, which pseudonymous identifiers I respectfully retained in my article after verification. No respectable journalist would divulge such verification to any but his publisher, for the reasons that follow.

Please allow me to offer an analogy that may explain why it might be difficult for those untrained in intelligence community investigative reportage to repeat these findings:

Please consider that it would be ludicrous for me to walk into a respected school and attempt to reproduce techniques mastered by kungfu practitioners who have studied for years. I respectfully request that you consider that it may be equally difficult for anyone without the proper contacts and years of experience to reproduce a professional journalist's research.

Contacts in the intelligence community, in particular, must be carefully nurtured and not spuriously distributed to any unverified email writer without compelling professional reasons. This is why I request such professional credentials from anyone who contacts me. As this is my living, I follow the example of other investigative reporters: It is rare that any in our profession offer confidential materials to anyone other than our publishers (and their vetting attorneys), who are under an equal ethical restraint against releasing them to those who offer no compelling professional interest with verifiable credentials.

I addressed the issue of verification previously and stand by my statements. That Mr. "Browning" is unable to duplicate the research (past pseudonyms and places) of a trained professional is surely not my concern.

I copy the correspondence with Mr. "Browning" as an example of how NOT to get a busy professional's assistance in research efforts.

As I suggested to Mr. (or Ms.) "Browning" in my final note below: "It seems clear that this project is important to you. However, for me the article was merely a small feature story written months ago. Currently, my schedule is filled with more pressing concerns."

To those of the forum who have behaved with the courtesy and firm resolve I have come to expect from practitioners of the martial arts, please accept my genuine thanks for your valuable time.

Jason Putman

---Samuel Browning Original Message 5/27/04---

Re: Some Questions about David Bannon's Account

Dear Mr. Putman:

My name is Samuel Browning and I am writing because I am very skeptical about Mr. Bannon's claims and thought you could provide some additional information that I could use to confirm parts on his account. In his book Bannon claimed on on August 30, 1998 that he was part of a "Wonderland Club" police and Interpol raid in which multiple suspects were killed. I have done a nexus/lexis search of florida newspapers from August and September and have found that there were only two "Wonderland Club" raids in Florida and one was in Jacksonville Florida and the other was in Miami Florida. No deaths were reported from either raid. Since this was an overt law enforcement operation rather than a covert hit, the existance of deaths would have been publically revealed. Could you please tell me in which town or city in which this raid occurred so I can contact the local authorities and confirm that this incident actually happened?

I've also called the New Orleans Police Department and they told me that they do not have a New Orleans Police Officer named Thomas Parker. Can you please tell me which command he works out of so I can contact him through an official NOPD number?

Finally could you please tell me the date and city in which Jacques Defferre was killed so I can confirm his death?

Thank you for your time.

Samuel Browning


---Jason Putman Response 5/28/04 (resent by request on 6/01/04)---

Samuel Browning

Re: Samuel Browning Consultation Agreement

Dear Mr. Browning:

Thank you for your letter. As a matter of policy, I do not discuss confidential material without first entering into a consultation agreement. May I ask if your interest is personal or professional?

If professional, please provide your full contact information (name, title, organization name, physical address, contact numbers) and verifiable credentials relevant to your profession (e.g. certifications, degrees, licenses, etc.).

After confirming your verifiable credentials and a legitimate professional interest, we can further discuss your relevant project and how I may assist you. At that time, I will be pleased to provide my full contact information and an overview of services and consultation fees. The terms of the fees are based on:

1. Hourly rate
2. Out-of-pocket expense
3. Specific task(s) assigned
4. Consultation Agreement terms

Thank you again and I look forward to discussing your project soon.

Jason Putman
JasonPutmanwrites@yahoo.com
http://www.geocities.com/jasonputmanwrites


---Samuel Browning Response 5/28/04---

As Mr. Putnam requested in his post I first e-mailed him some questions and he then mailed me back what was described in its title as a consultancy agreement and which I promptly erased by accident. Since I don't wish to pay Mr. Putnam so that he can answer questions...


---Jason Putman Response 6/01/04---

Samuel Browning

Mr. Browning:

Thank you for your posted response.

It seems clear that this project is important to you. However, for me the article was merely a small feature story written months ago. Currently, my schedule is filled with more pressing concerns.

As you have not displayed verifiable credentials and a legitimate professional interest, and without a consultation agreement, I regret that I can offer you no more of my time.

Best of luck,

Jason Putman"

On June 2, 2004 I made my reply in Post #70, and please note I did provide my credentials. Putman however, never returned to the thread, and Bannon never even posted on this thread despite Gene Ching's best efforts.

"Mr. Putman dodges the issue.

Mr. Putman has asserted that he did not reply to my letter because I did not provide professional credentials. This is simply a red herring since his letter states "As a matter of policy I do not discuss confidential material without first entering into a consultation agreement" Since I am not being paid for looking into this matter, my interest was not professional. I wrote him because he invited the curious from this boad to do so, and therefore I did not send him an email with my credentials which are as follows.

My Connecticut Law License is Juris number, #417779 and my status as an attorney can be checked my calling the Statewide Grievance Committee in Hartford Connecticut (Area code 860) which keeps records of all attorneys licensed to practice law in the state of Connecticut. It will be listed under Samuel Pearce Browning. My professional mailing address is 671 Scotland Rd, Norwich Ct, 06360.

If you wish to be adventurous please call the University of Connecticut School of Law in Hartford Connecticut and ask the alumni office if I indeed did graduate from there with a J.D. in 1998.

For my Masters Degree in Forensic Science/Advanced Investigation, please call the University of New Haven in West Haven, Connecticut, my graduation date from this instiitution was January, 2004.

Now lets move on to the issue of claiming that you did not want to answer my questions because they would in essence expose confidential sources. My questions did not require this because it was Mr. Bannon who insisted on identifying that he was involved in a perfectly legal "Wonderland club" police raid in Florida on August 30, 1998 that you said resulted the death of four criminals who were involved in the sexual assault on a little girl.

A quick forensic comment, when someone dies in a police raid in Florida they fall under the jurisdiction of the district medical examiner and will receive an official death certificate memorializing their cause of death and a free autopsy. You tell me the town, and I'll pull their paperwork, If you can't do that, then the credibility of your account circles the drain. And you don't have to give up a single secret source, what could be better then that?

Similarly I asked for the place of death of Jacques Defferre so I could also confirm the manner of his death. Both you and Bannon use his name throughout your public works and have not previously indicated that it is a pseudonym. You even feature a picture of him in your article, if you were attempting to protect his identity you had a strange way of doing so. I even asked you for the names of the Federal appallate cases Bannon has been acting as a witness, since such cases have files accessible to the public. But you don't seem to be able to help your case even here.

'Therefore, it is reasonable to expect that a number of the names and places identified in the book are pseudonyms, which pseudonymous identifiers I respectfully retained in my article after verification. No respectable journalist would divulge such verification to any but his publisher'

If Thomas Parker was a pseudonym for a New Orleans Police Officer this should have been indicated in the article or through the footnote you gave his account. (number 26) Since there were no "Wonderland Club" raids in New Orleans we are left with the presumption that 1) No New Orleans Police Officer or person of this name observed the raid you credit to him. I understand the use of a clearly marked pseudonym, but an uncredited fake name and fake discriptive information? What sort of writer are you Mr. Putnam? BTW I got my information on the lack of a Mr. Parker by calling the personel division of "his" department. Can you provide me with his badge number to prove his existance?

Finally you write:

'As a feature story for a popular magazine, the article was designed to inform, not to convince. The material was not presented as a research paper'

This is why you provided 42 footnotes to this article, some quite lengthy to convince the reader of its reliability yet you can't provide or support basic, important, facts in Bannon's story.

I hope you can offer better proof of you're and Mr. Bannon's claims. Whether you wish to acknowledge this or not, by endorsing his story you have tied your credibility to his, and his claims will be vigorously investigated over the next several months.

Samuel Pearce Browning Esq"

POSTSCRIPTS

We never received another response though there are three postscripts to this story.

During the last week of February 2005, I called Random House Publishers in New York at 212-751-2600. After repeatedly asking to talk to someone in the editorial division, they sent me up to Signe Pike, at extention 2172. Signe works in editorial for Ballentine, one of Random House's subsidiaries, but was willing to look in the Random House database to see if there was any record of them having an author on contract named Jason Putman. She found no trace of his name or the title of his book. She requested however that I double check by asking who his editor is, since she didn't want to be the final word in this matter.

To the present date, Random House does not list a Putman or Putnam as an author when one places these last names in its index http://tinyurl.com/9z4n9

To put it mildly this is highly suspicious since Putman claims his book was to be published in 2005 and it is already 2006.

I have been asked why I have not contacted Bannon in person, and the short answer is that approximately a year after I became involved in this investigation, but well before I had completed my research, I learned from Gene Ching that in a conversation Bannon had told him that he was considering suing me for defamation. At that point I decided that if Mr. Bannon wanted to obtain information from me, and information is always exchanged in a conversation, he could go through the formal discovery process in order to make his case for defamation.

Finally I decided that Mr. Bannon was unwilling or unable to provide documentation that would support his story because when the local magazine "Creative Loafing" asked him for such proof the following transpired.

"In Creative Loafing's attempt to get to the bottom of the whole saga, we did the obvious asked for evidence. Bannon and his publisher supplied CL with reams of documents, most of them ancillary copies of news magazine and website stories about Interpol and the fact that the agency targets terrorists and child pornographers; no mention was made, however, of killings by Interpol agents. The publisher also provided some rather oblique documents showing what they allege to be Korean bank statements showing money given to Bannon by Interpol, as well as alleged Interpol papers "seeking to recruit a Crime Intelligence Officer for its Trafficking in Humans Crime Sub-Directorate." The recruitment documents are so specific they even include working hours: "37 1/2 hours a week with a 45-minute lunch break." They were all documents that we or anyone else could have typed up at the office with the help of a Korean dictionary and some creative government doublespeak. There was really nothing conclusive about any of it -- no official Interpol seal, no signature, nothing." (See the text of this article provided below)

Of course Mr. Jason Putman claims in his Kung Fu Magazine e-article that: "Bannon's safety has been guaranteed by the information he supplied -- and the 256 pages of documents he has carefully hidden across three countries as insurance." But Bannon couldn't produce one of these documents for "Creative Loafing", and therefore was unlikely to provide them for me upon request.

However lets suppose for the sake of argument it is Putman not Bannon who has somehow mispoken on matters that were not contained within "Race Against Evil". did Bannon ever step forward at anytime over the last two years to correct his chosen scribe? The answer is no so we have to assume that Bannon's story is as Putman represents it, warts and all.

[Sam Browning]

B) The Mysterious Chiu Hse Yu, Ph.D

In his Inside Kungfu E-Article Jason Putman states: "Much of my research was assisted by Professor Chiu Hse Yu of Singapore University, with whom I co-wrote "Interpol's Secret Army" for The Western Libertartian Alliance political journal. Bannon also has an article in the same issue, 'The Hidden Slavery: Global Sex Trafficking,' which - true to his character - mentions nothing about his own book. The issue in question can be downloaded in entirety (1.9 M) as a PDF file at
http://tinyurl.com/de2nb or go to http://www.westernlibertarian.org/paper and choose "WLA Complete".
Professor Chiu's web site (and contact address) is: http://www.geocities.com/chiuhse_yu" [SB: this would be http://tinyurl.com/7oss8 ]

http://tinyurl.com/bpecp See Post #12

On May 27, 2004 "CFT" raised the first questions concerning Chiu Hse Yu's role in this matter at Post #52.

"I have a number of points to make about your "co-author" of the "Western Libertartian Alliance" article:

1) Website veracity
The website you reference (http://www.geocities.com/chiuhse_yu/) [SB: http://tinyurl.com/7oss8 ] is a GeoCities page which is missing the Singapore Management University letters (SMU), but does show the Lions head logo. Only a (correct) contact address is shown but no contact numbers. The email address is a Yahoo one.

Her real page is: http://www.business.smu.edu.sg/law/f...hiu_hseyu.html [SB working link is http://tinyurl.com/7z8n7 ] and shows the full contact details and legitimate smu.edu.sg email address. Her research interests are to do with Business law not Human Trafficking or International policing organisations.

2) Article Authorship details
The "co-author" details (Chiu Hse Yu) are not accurate:

She does not have a Ph.D. (according to her own resume) and is not a lecturer in Law at the National University of Singapore; she is a lecturer at the Singapore Management University, a completely different organisation. She does however hold a law degree (LLB) from the National University of Singapore.

She has not published a book called 'Punishment as Response to Harm', Singapore University Press, 1997. She only received her undergraduate degree in 1997.

She does have an article in the Singapore Journal of Legal Studies, Dec. 2002 http://tinyurl.com/8pclt Interestingly there is another article with a similar title ...

Australian Influences on the Insider Trading Laws in Singapore
Chiu Hse Yu

Punishment as Response to Harm:
Why the Attempt Warrants Lesser Punishment Than the Completed Crime
Davinia Filza Abdul Aziz"

Two years later, some of these "Chiu Hse Yu websites" no longer exist, but I can attest that they were as CFT described at the time. So I and several other Bullshido members attempted to get in touch with Chiu Hse Yu to confirm that she had co-authored articles with Mr. Putman.

Our goal was to confirm if there was a Chiu Hse Yu Ph.D who is "Lecturer in Law at National University of Singapore and author of 'Punishment as Response to Harm' (Singapore University Press, 1997)." which was how she was described in her article by the Western Libertarian Alliance. (1) After we confirmed CFT's information that such a person had taught at Singapore MANAGEMENT University (caps added) and had not written this book, we decided to contact Singapore National University to see if they had a Chiu Hse Yu who was a lecturer in Law and had a Ph.D.

Bullshido Member liuzg150181 who was a student at the National University of Singapore wrote the following message to the dean of the Law School.

From: (his name and e-mail)
Sent: Tuesday, July 20, 2004 11:06 AM
To: Tan Cheng Han (Dean, Law)
Subject: A Special Request from an NUS undergrad

Dear Assoc Prof TAN Cheng Han,

My name is (my real name) and I am an undergraduate(School of Computing) here at Singapore National University. I am making a request to confirm some information on behalf of an American friend, Samuel Browning. He is an attorney in Norwich, Connecticut, USA. If you are interested in doing so, his professional credentials can be verified by going to the link provided below (just type “Browning”):

http://tinyurl.com/9g3x3

The request which my friend and I would like to make is related to our investigation of an article entitled “Interpol’s Secret Army” which is in the E-Newsletter attached to the e-mail. One particular issue among many, leads me to write you.

One of the co-authors, Chiu Hse Yu is alleged to have a Ph.D and to be a lecturer in law at NUS. It appears that she is not a lecturer this year, based on the NUS website and the admin staff I have approached. After searching the internet we have discovered she actually used to be a lecturer at SMU though she had since gone to the University of Leicester England. Additionally, she was not the author of “Punishment in Response to Harm” (in fact another lecturer in SMU is the author of a journal article by this name). When Samuel e-mailed her to make inquiries she replied that she never co-authored that article. Worse still she did not even know Jason Putman nor David Bannon, and it is likely that this is a case of identity theft.

The link below is the thread regarding the investigation:

http://www.bullshido.net/forums/sho...5&pagenumber=14

However, Samuel Browning and I would like to make sure that the “Chiu Hse Yu” which supposedly had co-authored the newspaper article “Interpol’s Secret Army” is the same person whom Samuel had contacted, therefore we sincerely would request your assistance in three aspects. First we would like to know if there has been lecturer in the NUS law faculty known “Chiu Hse Yu” since 2000 and if she does exist, we would like to request her last known professional address. Secondly, we would like to know if there is any way which we could check how many lawyers with the name “Chiu Hse Yu” are licensed in Singapore. Could you please refer us to the appropriate government agency that registers lawyers? Finally we would be interested to find out how many people named Chiu Hse Yu have graduated from our University's law school and their graduation dates. Is NUS the only law school in Singapore, and if it is not could you please tell us the names of any other such accredited institutions?

Thanks for taking time to read my e-mail and for addressing these concerns.

He replied:

"As you have pointed out in your message, Chiu Hse Yu is not a faculty member of the NUS law school and we have never had any such person on staff.
-----Original Message-----

Later in August of 2004 Liuzg150181 wrote the NUS Business School:

"To: askbiz@nus.edu.sg
(General inquiry e-mail address)
Title:An inquiry........

Content:Hi, my name is (omitted) and i am currently helping my friend to contact Prof. Chiu Hse Yu so that he could interview her,from the info i got she is currently teaching in NUS business school.Is she teaching there now?If not where had she left and how could i contact her?"

"From: 'Helpdesk, NUS Business School'
Hi (omittedO,

We do not have a Professor by this name.

Thanks and Regards,
Chelsey Chen
Corporate Development Office
NUS Business School"

Being somewhat bored during early 2005 I also wrote the President's Office of the National University of Singapore directly to ask if they had a Lecturer in Law named Chiu Hse Yu and received the following typed letter.

"14 March 2005

Dear Mr. Browning

I refer to your letter of 14 February to President Shih Choon Fong.

There is no Chiu Hse Yu who is a member of the teaching staff at the NUS law school nor, to the best of my knowledge is she employed by any other department within NUS.

Yours sincerely
*signature*
Professor Tan Cheng Han S.C.

13 Law Link, 3rd Level, Singapore 117590
Tel: (65) 6874 3631 Fax: (65) 6776-3601"
Email: lawdean@nus.edu.sg

Previously we had discovered that the Chiu Hse Yu who was at Singapore Manufacturing University had moved to the University of Leicester so I e-mailed her there. Notice how she does give me a hard time about my own credentials. :)

From: TappingReeve@aol.com [mailto:TappingReeve@aol.com]
Sent: Mon 6/28/2004 11:23 PM
To: hyc8@leicester.ac.uk
Subject: Dear Professor Chiu, an inquiry from America.

Dear Professor Chiu:

My name is Samuel Browning and I am an attorney who is writing from Norwich, Connecticut, USA. Recently while looking into some claims by an individual named David Bannon, Ph.D, I discovered an article in a publication distributed by the Western Libertarian Alliance which appeared to be co-authored by you and a Mr. Jason Putman. See:

http://tinyurl.com/de2nb

While I believe it lists your name correctly, (Chiu Hse Yu) I am curious if this article is authentic because it refers to you as having a Ph.D when you actually earned a LLB, claims you were a lecturer in Law at the National University of Singapore, when you taught at the Singapore Management University, and asserts you are the author of a book called Punishment as Response to Harm (Singapore University Press, 1997) when you do not list this book as one of your publications on your present website.

To summarize, I am asking, 1) If you actually co-authored the article "Interpol's Secret Army with Mr. Putman, and if you did, 2) can you inform me which portions of this article you authored so I may ask you some more specific questions attempting to verify Mr. Bannon's story concerning the activities of Interpol.

Thank you for your time and attention to this matter.

Samuel P. Browning Esq
671 Scotland Rd
Norwich, Ct 06360 USA

SHE REPLIED:

"Dear Mr Browning

With regard to your queries, I have never co-authored anything with Mr Putman. I am not associated with the persons who wrote the article in the mentioned newsletter. I believe that the person named as "Chiu Hse Yu" whom you are looking for, is not me.
In fact, I find it rather puzzling that you are not listed on any US attorney directories. I also think it would have been appropriate if you had used your organisational email address. I am not inclined to receive any correspondence from less than verifiable sources.
I trust that this reply meets your request.
Yours sincerely
Iris Chiu"

MY RESPONSE:

Dear Iris:

Thank you for your prompt reply. To answer your question about my professional licensing please go to http://tinyurl.com/9g3x3
This is part of the Connecticut Judicial branch's official website. If you type in my Juris Number of #417779 or my full name Samuel Pearce Browning my professional listing will come up. As for attorney directories, you are correct, I am not listed in Martindale Hubbell, but since I practice mostly criminal and family support law, I have found that my clients typically do not mind this omission. If you desire to see further evidence that I am an attorney, please let me know.

Sincerely yours,

Samuel Browning Esq
__________________________________________________ _

Then after thinking over the matter I decided she might like to know what was being done in her name. So I sent an additional letter.

From: TappingReeve@aol.com [mailto:TappingReeve@aol.com]
Sent: Fri 7/2/2004 7:46 PM
To: hyc8@leicester.ac.uk
Subject: Was your identity stolen?


Dear Iris:

I'm writing back for two reasons, the first is that in my last e-mail I said that to search my name on the Connecticut Judicial website you should enter my full name into the website I provided, I just tried my own instructions, and have learned that you only need to enter my last name "Browning" to achieve this result.

Secondly, I decided after thinking it over, that I should share some unpleasant news. You should read the following thread because there is the unfortunate possibilty that your identity has been borrowed by Mr. Putman. See:

http://forum.kungfumagazine.com/for...15&pagenumber=1 [SB Note: sorry we couldn't fix this link]

"Much of my research was assisted by Professor Chiu Hse Yu of Singapore University, with whom I co-wrote "Interpol's Secret Army" for The Western Libertartian Alliance political journal. Bannon also has an article in the same issue, "The Hidden Slavery: Global Sex Trafficking," which - true to his character - mentions nothing about his own book. The issue in question can be downloaded in entirety (1.9 M) as a PDF file at

http://tinyurl.com/de2nb
or got to http://www.westernlibertarian.org/paper and choose "WLA Complete".
Professor Chiu's web site (and contact address) is: http://www.geocities.com/chiuhse_yu " [SB: or http://tinyurl.com/7oss8 ]

This last geocities website is no longer in its original form, (it was pretty much erased) but it was an imitation of your Singapore Management University website and featured the same photo that is on http://tinyurl.com/7z8n7

One of the posters CFT has a series of posts that pointed out some of the similarities and differences between your biographical information and a woman with your same name. I've reviewed his evidence and his characterization of the facts is accurate. He points out that a book attributed to "Chiu Hse Yu Ph.D" in the Western Libertarian Alliance Article was called "Punishment as Response to Harm", Singapore University Press, 1997. which was actually the name of another author's article in the Singapore Journal of Legal Studies, Dec. 2002 http://tinyurl.com/8pclt in which you had an article.

I cannot tell you what the statistical chances that there would be two women named Chiu Hse Yu who were both lecturers in law working at two different universities in Singapore at roughly the same time, but my guess is that the odds would be pretty small. Please tell me however if you know of an identically named women working at the National University of Singapore as a lecturer in law at roughly the same time as you were working at Singapore Management University. Otherwise I think you may have been the victim of identity theft.

Sincerely

Samuel Browning

HER REPLY:

Dear Mr Browning

I read your message with great concern. This sounds like a case of identity theft to me. There is probably no other Singaporean lecturer in law with the same name that I know . Could you let me know what "CFT" stands for? It is not a familiar abbrieviation to me.
Upon some further investigation, I found that the name "chiu hse yu" has been used again in Amazon.com, under reviews for David Bannon's book. I am not amused. I am certainly not associated with any of the links you provided me or the Amazon.com link.
Sincerely
Iris

________________________________


HERE IS THE TEXT OF THE LETTER THAT APPEARED ON AMAZON.COM IN CHIU HSE YU's NAME.


2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

Tour de force, October 27, 2003
Reviewer: Chiu Hse Yu (see more about me) from Singapore
A work of deep humanity and insight, Race Against Evil is an extraordinary tour de force, though not for the faint-hearted. It is an important but deeply disturbing book that offers a terrifying, unflinching look at an organization of shame and glory: Interpol. Bannon's startlingly humble revelations are bold and chilling as they reveal a simple truth: men and women derive pleasure from officially sanctioned killing. The implications of Bannon's memoir are profound - we are forced to understand the intelligence officer as human rather than monster, victim and abuser. Intensely arresting and thought-provoking.

_______________________________________________

Conclusion:

Yes, I know it is hypothetically possible that unknown to the National University of Signapore Dean of the Law School, and the Lawyer Chiu Hse Yu who taught at Signapore Management University, there could be a second Chiu Hse Yu. She would have had to have been lecturing in law in a subdivision of NUS, other then the law or business school sometime before July 2004 when I, and fellow Bullshido members started sending e-mail and making inquiries. Since Putman's online article for Kungfu Magazine and his article for the Western Libertarian Alliance both appear to have been written in early 2004 (Footnote 18 of the Kungfu Magazine aticle cites a Fox news story dated March 21, 2004) it is possible that she was at the NUS until early 2004 and then left without meeting her SMU counterpart. Since Singapore is a very small place I find this rather implausable.

Since 1994 Chiu Hse Yu has moved to the University of Cambridge and can be reached through an e-mail address here: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/cf_dev/A...?per_id=389646

(1) I did contact the Western Libertarian Alliance to attempt to confirm that their Chiu Hse Yu existed. They were proud to provide me absolutely no information about her and Mr. Putman though I did later buy a CD of one of Bannon's interviews from one of their members.

[Sam Browning]

C) The Disappearing Profiler, Toni G. Brynes

On page 294 of "Race Against Evil" Bannon describes being present at his Florida "Wonderland" raid with Toni Brynes "A behavioral scientist" and long time friend. Toni is described as having been Bannon's neighbor when "I had moved back to the States permanently." "Toni had been consulting with the FBI's Baltimore Field Division's Innocent Images National Initiative (IINI), a component of the Crimes Against Children (CAC) Program, designed to track and apprehend online child pornographers."

Later in the back of Bannon's book which was published in 2003, Toni's full name is given. It is Toni G. Brynes, Ph.D, M.D. and her location is given as "Dublin, Ireland" and she says "I've been in this business too long. It's horrible to watch the victims. Their responses are all different, but eerily similar. In sixteen years, I've never seen anything like what I saw with Race and Annie." (RAE, pp 305-306, quote from page 305). In a letter to Kung Fu Qigong, March/April 2002, pp. 34, 85 Toni G. Brynes Ph.D., M.D. identifies herself as a "MHAI Development Officer, North Dublin Mental Health, Ireland". So our inquiry shifted to Ireland.

On July 2, 2004, a date that will live forever on my phone bill, I started to make phone calls in Ireland.

I first called the Medical Council, Lynn House, Portobello Court, Lower Rathmines Road, Dublin 6, Ireland. I talked to Cilla Hickey who I reached at 01 353 1 498 3100 . She told me that there was no M.D. licensed to practice medicine in Ireland under that name. So if she exists, Toni could only be professionally using her Ph.D. I am still working on finding the government agency that licenses Ph.Ds in Psychology.

From an earlier e-mail I had been told by Orla O'Sullivan of Mental Health Ireland that a Toni G. Brynes had never worked for her organization, Orla@mentalhealthireland.ie but she suggested that I contact the Director of Mental Health Services in the Northern Area Health Board which provided mental health services in Northern Dublin. When I talked to Ann, the Director's administrative assistant at 01 353 1 813 1800 she told me (after she asked a co-worker) that they had not heard of a Toni Byrnes. Ann was also unfamilar with an organization called North Dublin Mental Health. So I called ATT international directory assistance, and asked them to look for a business or agency in Dublin or Northern Dublin called North Dublin Mental Heath. They found nothing in Dublin, saying that there was no separate listing for North Dublin. Then they checked for professional listings under the name of Toni Byrnes in Dublin, Nothing. Then they checked for a residental phone number under this name, Nothing Again.

I then contacted he Psychological Society of Ireland. to see if Toni had voluntarily registered with the one organization in Ireland that compiles a list of Psychology Ph.D treaters.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
-----Original Message-----
From: Samuel Browning
Posted At: 07 July 2004 06:18
Posted To: Info
Conversation: Looking for a Toni Brynes
Subject: Looking for a Toni Brynes


Name: Samuel Browning Esq
Email: I edited my e-mail out
Phone: [SB edited it out]

Subject: Looking for a Toni Brynes

MESSAGE BEGINS

To who it may concern:

I am conducting a background check and am looking to confirm the existance of a Toni G. Brynes Ph.D. She is a psychologist who is, or was, employed as a "MHAl Development Officer" for an organization called North Dublin Mental Health in Ireland.

My questions are as follows.

1) Do you have any record of this individual belonging to your organization?

2) Have you ever heard of a North Dublin Mental Health? International Directory Assistance could not locate them in Dublin which is where I understand North Dublin is located.

3) I understand that Psychologists are not licensed in Ireland, and register voluntarily with your organization.

Please tell me if my understanding is correct, and what percentage of Psychologists (those with Ph.Ds in Psychcology who practice in Ireland register with your organization.

Thank you for your assistance in this matter.

Samuel Pearce Browning Esq.

MESSAGE ENDS

THEIR FIRST RESPONSE

Dear Samuel,

We do not have a member by the name of Toni G Byrnes on our database. It is not, however, compulsory to register with us.
Unfortunately, we have no way of collating data regarding psychologists who are non-members and therefore cannot give you a percentage.
I have attached the membership guidelines of our association which should answer any queries you have regarding this.

Regards
Caitríona

Caitríona Ní Mhurchú
Office Assistant
The Psychological Society of Ireland
CX House
2a Corn Exchange Place
Poolbeg Street
Dublin 2


-----Original Message-----
From: Samuel Browning
Sent: 07 July 2004 19:02
To: Caitriona NiMhurchu
Subject: Re: Looking for a Toni Brynes


Hi Caitriona:

Thank you very much for your prompt reply. I am writing back because you said that there was no Toni G. Byrnes in your database when the last name of the person I was interested in, is spelled Brynes. Could you please check to make sure that there is no one in your records by this slightly different last name?

Once again thank you,

Samuel Browning Esq

THEIR SECOND REPLY

MESSAGE FROM PSI WEB SITE

Dear Samuel,

Apologies for that slip. There is no Brynes in our database either I'm afraid

Regards
Caitríona


Caitríona Ní Mhurchú
Office Assistant
The Psychological Society of Ireland
CX House
2a Corn Exchange Place
Poolbeg Street
Dublin 2

So Toni is not listed as a psychologist by the Psychological Society of Ireland, this does not mean that she does not exist because registration is voluntary but once again it makes her existance LESS likely.

Then last week, February 6-10, 2006 I talked to Gregg O. McCrary over the phone. Mr. McCrary whose website is at http://tinyurl.com/c27ll retired from the FBI in 1996 after spending years as an FBI profiler. Remember how Bannon said that Toni used to consult with the FBI as a "Behavioral Scientist"? McCrary said that he had never heard of her.

Once again its possible that Toni started consulting with the FBI only after McCrary left, and he never heard of her activities after he retired, but its doubtful. We are however checking a couple more places for Toni and I will provide updates as they become available.


D) Fun With Guns

In "Race Against Evil", page 77, Bannon writes that early in his career: "Defferre took me to the Gendarme shooting range [in Paris] and had me try out a SIG-Sauer. I sucked. We tried a Beretta. Still sucked. We tried everything in the range and had some good instructors try their best to teach me the basics. Hopeless. Imagine aiming a pistol at a wall and missing. That was me. I sucked in Paris and I've never improved."

Of course this gives Bannon more excuses to use a knife to "clean" people but even if he never mastered the pistol is it rational for him to make some of the mistakes he does when writing about firearms? After all he was supposedly trained by very good instructors.

Take the following passage when he's training to be an assassin and he describes what another trainee does on a mock cleansing.

"William [another trainee] tagged his target at the same club every night. Using blanks, he walked up to the the target outside the club, pumped one in the head and two in the body and drove away in a car he'd boosted for the occasion. Full marks for William. William had used the Parabellum, a type of German Luger. Bennet vouched for a Beretta high-powered .22 caliber. 'It goes in but doesn't always come out. Nice and tidy and no need for a silencer,' he said." (RAE, p. 146)

In his post on the Bullshido "Frank Dux Would Be Proud Thread" on June 4, 2004, Bullshido member and firearms enthusiast Don Gwinn points out some problems with this passage. http://tinyurl.com/dm3st See post #148.

"2. The only "Parabellum" associated with the Luger pistol would be the "9mm Parabellum." This is a caliber, NOT a pistol. The Luger was one of the first pistols to use it, but no way would anyone who knew what he was talking about say that there's a version of the Luger called a Parabellum. I've heard of people referring to John Browning's "Model 1911" design as the "Forty-Five," but I've never heard of any 9mm pistol referred to as a "Parabellum."

3. There's no such thing as a "Beretta High-Powered .22." It sounds like he's combining two real guns. One would be a Beretta .22, which actually is favored by some agencies that do real assassinations (there aren't many--Mossad is one I've heard of doing such things.)

The other would be the Browning High Power, or Model 1935. These are 9mm handguns. There are .22 conversion kits out there, and maybe some factory .22s, but although it's one of the most-copied designs in the world, manufactured by Browning, Inglis, FN, FM, FEG and many others, it has never, to my knowledge, been made by Beretta. My guess is that he read about Mossad or someone using the Beretta .22, then read about the SAS using the Hi-Power, and later couldn't remember that they're two separate guns, never having fired either one."

Later on an operation in Thailand which supposedly took place in 1991, an Interpol operator is described as carrying "a Heckler & Koch Mark 23 .45 ACP pistol". (See the opening paragraph of Jason Putman's KungFu Magazine Article) A discription of the Mark 23 can be found here. http://tinyurl.com/c34ok

Notice that while this design was requested by the United States Special Operations Command in 1991, the first production models were delivered to the United States Military in May of 1996. So how did a member of Interpol obtain a non-production firearm that was in the very beginning of its development? Once again we are confronted with a possibility so improbable that it is ridiculous.

[Sam Browning]

Here is a series of fixed links by Samurai Steve, They will provide an index and replacement for some of the links in the above article.

Ok, there are 2-3 links I was unable to get.

http://ezine.kungfumagazine.com/for...?threadid=30228

becomes

http://ezine.kungfumagazine.com/foru...ad.php?t=30228

becomes

http://tinyurl.com/bpecp
=====

http://charlotte.creativeloafing.com...ews_cover.html

becomes

http://tinyurl.com/bdh4z

===

http://ezine.kungfumagazine.com/eziphp?article=499

becomes

http://ezine.kungfumagazine.com/ezin...hp?article=499

becomes

http://tinyurl.com/btupx
===

http://www.westernlibertarian.org/p...20low%20res.pdf

becomes

http://www.westernlibertarian.org/pa...0low%20res.pdf

becomes

http://tinyurl.com/de2nb
===

http://users.pandora.be/policecollection

becomes

http://www.policecollection.be/

becomes

http://tinyurl.com/7odqp

===

http://users.skynet.be/bs171567/CM1_2/INDEX.htm

becomes

http://tinyurl.com/a9a2w
===

http://ezine.kungfumagazine.com/eziphp?article=499

becomes

http://ezine.kungfumagazine.com/ezin...hp?article=499

becomes

http://tinyurl.com/btupx
====

http://www.capricornhotels.co.uk/byrondefault.asp

becomes

http://tinyurl.com/7f9u2

===

http://ezine.kungfumagazine.com/ezi...php?article=499

becomes

http://ezine.kungfumagazine.com/ezin...hp?article=499

becomes

http://tinyurl.com/btupx

===

http://tinyurl.com/bpecp

is the same thing as

http://tinyurl.com/7f9u2


===

http://www.westernlibertarian.org/p...20low%20res.pdf

becomes

http://www.westernlibertarian.org/pa...0low%20res.pdf

becomes

http://tinyurl.com/de2nb

===

http://www.geocities.com/chiuhse_yu

becomes

http://tinyurl.com/7oss8

===

http://www.geocities.com/JasonPutmanwrites

becomes

http://tinyurl.com/82qut
===

http://www.randomhouse.com/index.pperl

becomes

http://tinyurl.com/9z4n9

===

http://www.westernlibertarian.org/p...20low%20res.pdf

becomes

http://www.westernlibertarian.org/pa...0low%20res.pdf

becomes

http://tinyurl.com/de2nb

===

http://www.business.smu.edu.sg/law/f...hiu_hseyu.html

becomes

http://www.business.smu.edu.sg/law/f...hiu_hseyu.html

becomes

http://tinyurl.com/7z8n7

(you owe me for this one, Sam. I had to do sleuthing to find her page, since it's not directly accessible from staff or faculty. I found it by putting her name in Google along with SMU)

===

http://law.nus.edu.sg/sjls/sjls2002d.htm

becomes

http://tinyurl.com/8pclt
===

http://www.jud2.state.ct.us/Civil_Inquiry/GetAtty.asp

becomes

http://tinyurl.com/9g3x3
===

http://www.bullshido.net/forums/sho...5&pagenumber=14

becomes

CANNOT FIND THIS ONE. PUTTING CHIU HSE YU INTO GOOGLE WITH BULLSHIDO AS SEARCH TURNS UP 2 LINKS IN AREAS I CANNOT ACCESS:

http://www.bullshido.net/forums/showthread.php?p=383112
http://bullshido.net/forums/showthread.php?p=324128

LOOKING AT THE GOOGLE CACHE SHOWS THE THREAD, BUT THE LINK IS BROKEN THERE AS WELL

DOING A BULLSHIDO SEARCH FOR CHIU TURNS UP NOTHING.

SORRY'Z

===

http://forum.kungfumagazine.com/for...15&pagenumber=1

becomes

SORRY. CANNOT FIND THIS EITHER, DESPITE DOING FORUM SEARCHES FOR TERMS. GOOGLE NO HELP EITHER

===

http://www.business.smu.edu.sg/law/...chiu_hseyu.html

becomes

http://www.business.smu.edu.sg/law/f...hiu_hseyu.html

becomes

http://tinyurl.com/7z8n7

===

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/cf_dev/A...?per_id=389646

becomes

http://tinyurl.com/e45bt

===

http://www.criminalprofiler.com/bio.htm

becomes

http://tinyurl.com/c27ll

===

http://www.bullshido.net/forums/show...ghlight=bannon

becomes

http://tinyurl.com/czl93

MAY ALSO SUGGEST http://www.bullshido.net/forums/show...hp?p=862153&po
stcount=148
WHICH BECOMES

http://tinyurl.com/dm3st
WHICH IS POST 148 THAT YOU REFER TO

===

http://www.hkdefense.us/pages/milita...guns/mk23.html

becomes

http://tinyurl.com/c34ok

[Sam Browning]

Man Of Mystery
David Race Bannon: former assassin for Interpol, or outrageous liar?
http://tinyurl.com/bdh4z

BY SAM BOYKIN

Bannon, a 39-year-old husband and father, comes across as a perfectly nice and pleasant fellow. He taught computer science at colleges in Greensboro and Raleigh for about four years before moving to Charlotte in 2000 to take a job at Information Architects, which went belly-up last year. This, of course, makes his cloak and dagger claims that much harder to swallow. But then again, how are secret agents and assassins supposed to act? And what do they typically do once they retire? Maybe they're all as seemingly normal and affable as Bannon, who also claims to have black belts in hapkido and kendo, and to speak fluent Korean and Japanese. If Bannon is making it all up, he's pretty adept at deception. He's also gone to a lot of trouble -- radio and newspaper interviews, book signings, producing copious (if somewhat oblique) documents, not to mention committing to memory a catalogue of names, places and events. And for what? He's not getting rich from the book's publication. However, he is receiving increasing attention. Since the book was released last month, he's reaped a growing amount of both local and national media coverage. Some have dismissed Bannon's story as outright fantasy, and say he's little more than a Chuck Barris wannabe (the host of the 1970s Gong Show who claims he was also a CIA assassin), and a slightly unhinged guy who craves the spotlight. Others believe Bannon is telling the truth -- that he was an actual international secret agent and assassin who has decided to come clean. So is he the real deal or a delusional fraud? You be the judge.

From Missionary to Assassin
We met at a local restaurant, and as he downed one Diet Coke after another, Bannon, sharply dressed in a black suit, balding, and a little soft around the middle, told me his tale of international intrigue. Folks sitting nearby exchanged surprised looks and craned their necks to listen as Bannon related story after story of riots, prisons, assassinations, lost loves, torture and child pornographers. This is his version of events.

Bannon was born in Spokane, WA, and from an early age was involved in The Church of Latter Day Saints. It was through his involvement with the church that Bannon traveled to South Korea to do missionary work.

After he arrived in South Korea, Bannon was caught up in Korea's deadly Kwangju student riots in 1981. "The riots were very violent, and some 2,500 people were killed before American troops and the Republic of Korea took the city back," Bannon says.

While helping treat some of the wounded at a Korean school, Bannon was attacked by a rioter, who stabbed him in the back with a long knife. Using his martial arts training, Bannon snapped his attacker's neck, killing him instantly. Bannon, badly wounded in the fight, spent nearly a month recuperating in the Chonju Presbyterian Hospital. When it came time for Bannon to return to missionary life, he says his experiences during the riots left him confused.

"I had to deal with the fact that here I am at 18, and I've taken someone else's life," he says. "I had all these conflicting emotions that were playing havoc with me."

Bannon began to pull away from the mission life, and fell in with a group of smugglers. He was dealing with mostly innocuous contraband -- liquor, magazines, candy -- and it was a quick and easy way to make some money. But his stint in smuggling soon brought him into contact with some criminals who tried to rip him off. A fight ensued, and Bannon was thrown into Korea's infamous Taejon Prison, "home" to many political prisoners.

A few months into his sentence, Bannon was prematurely and mysteriously released. Waiting outside the prison for him was Commissaire Jacques Defferre of Interpol's national headquarters in Lyon, France. Defferre had heard about Bannon's bravery during the Kwangju riots, and thought he might prove useful. "The way Defferre laid it out to me was that he needed a snitch, and I was going to be it or I could go back to jail," Bannon says. "He knew I had connections as a smuggler, and he wanted me to use those connections to get him information."

Thus, says Bannon, began his career with Interpol. He was given a "legend" --essentially an in-depth cover identity -- and started working as a low-level informant. "They set me up in this apartment; I had a salary; I was traveling to France, and I was 19! I thought it was the coolest thing in the world."

Bannon soon proved himself as intelligent, capable and a quick learner. His martial arts skills and fluency in Korean and Japanese also made him valuable. Interpol began assigning him to more sensitive cases.

During this time, he met and fell in love with Sidelle Rimbaud, a beautiful French Direction de Surveillance du Territorie (DST) agent, who specialized in countering illegal drug trade, organized crime and arms proliferation. The couple moved into a small French villa, and made plans to marry. However, in 1982, Bannon, along with Rimbaud and a Korean National Intelligence Service (NIS) agent named Lee Hyung-Jin, was assigned to break up a group of North Koreans who were smuggling child porn to fund their terrorist cell. After weeks of surveillance, the teams descended upon a warehouse in Marseilles, where several of the terrorists were hiding. A vicious shootout followed, and Rimbaud was fatally shot in the chest and neck.

Bannon was devastated, but also furious and hungry for revenge. He says Interpol capitalized on his desperate frame of mind, and recruited him for Archangel, a secret branch of Interpol designed specifically to hunt those who traffic in children and kiddie porn. Bannon was given an intensive psychiatric exam, which determined he had the right combination of aggression and empathy to work as an Archangel operative.

"Archangel wanted someone with a tendency to accept violence as a solution to conflict," Bannon says. "However, that had to be weighed with a strong ethical base. In other words, someone who could both negotiate with people and slap them around. I seemed to fit that profile."

He was soon sent to a giant warehouse outside Lyon, France, where he underwent an intensive training regimen to prepare for the many dark and dangerous deeds he would be asked to do. Bannon rose each morning at 5:30am, and with a few other agents underwent rigorous exercises and weight training. This was followed by classes in unarmed combat and gruesome assassination techniques using fighting knives and stilettos. Bannon soon discovered that he had a knack for bladed weapons. His specialty was known as "wet work," or close-quarter, quiet assassinations.

Bannon said he was also shown horrific images of child pornography, rape and torture.

"This was the propaganda they used," he says. "To create this demonic Other, and encourage this sense of outrage in us and convince us that we were part of something bigger than ourselves. That we were the only ones who could possibly stop these villians."

Bannon was also tutored in international business lingo and practices, which would enable him to blend into the corporate world with ease, as his legends would often require. He went through grueling interrogations where he was drilled again and again on minute details of different legends. In the dangerous world of Archangel, one little slip-up could mean certain death. After three months of this type of extreme physical and mental training, it was time to go to work.

[Sam Browning]

Part II

Cleaning House
Bannon's first "cleaning assignment" took place in Romania. His target was "James," a known child molester who dealt in child prostitution and pornography. Bannon's legend was that of a young executive from a global company looking for cheap Romanian labor.

Bannon located James, who posed as an import/export broker, at his Romanian office. For several days Bannon shadowed James, and eventually followed him to Transylvania, where James took a tour of Bran Castle, better known as Castle Dracula, a big tourist trap in Romania. With Bannon looking on, James was approached by a middle-aged Romanian, and the two men left the castle together. Bannon followed the men through a network of alleys, and finally to a parked car. After James handed over a wad of cash, the other man opened the car door and pulled out a young girl. Bannon sprang into action. A quick strike to the throat of the Romanian, and a thrust of his utility knife into the heart of James, and both men lay dead.

Bannon says he spent the remainder of that evening curled up in the corner of his Romanian hotel room.

"Here was this little girl who I helped save," Bannon says. "On the other hand, when you felt the dull, throbbing horror of taking another person's life, it's hard to feel justified. It was a bizarre mix."

Archangel continued to send Bannon on investigations and "cleaning assignments" all over the world, the exact number of which Bannon won't say. But the first few years -- the early to mid-80s -- were the most intense and active.

However, it wasn't all work. In 1983, Bannon began dating "Shin," a beautiful Korean performance artist who lived in Seoul. Although a romance flourished, Bannon kept his true identity a secret, telling her he was a Canadian businessman. The two had been dating only a couple of months when Shin disappeared while in Osaka, Japan, for a performance gig. Using his Archangel connections with the Japanese yakuza, or mafia, Bannon learned that Shin was last seen in a small Japanese village called Yonago, where a known violent fetishist was bragging that he had graphic sexual pictures of a Korean woman. Bannon and his contact tracked the man to a small farm, where they found him working in the fields. While Bannon searched the farmer's house, his partner approached the suspect and started asking him questions. When Bannon heard the two men struggling outside, he grabbed a baseball bat and sprinted toward the commotion. His partner was badly hurt, and the farmer's arm was broken. Bannon, after an intense struggle, finally dropped his adversary with a blow to the neck using the bat. His partner finished the job with a hatchet.

After the fight, Bannon searched the farmer's house for his girlfriend. Eventually he found Shin. She had been dismembered and stuffed in a freezer.

It was also during this time that Bannon investigated a North Korean terrorist who also happened to be a double agent and longtime friend. He intercepted her as she was about to plant a bomb outside a South Korean national security agency. Before she could execute her plan, Bannon used lethal force to stop her. As he stood over her body, he was struck from behind and knocked unconscious. He awoke in the back of a truck as it approached Korea's Taejon Prison. Bannon says that as the truck pulled up to the prison's front gates, he noticed "wild dogs and pigs gnawing on corpses that were buried under piles of rock and stone." Bannon was stripped naked and detained with thousands of other prisoners. During this time he was tortured and interrogated, and witnessed horrors such as people being tossed alive into furnaces, or attacked by dogs. Bannon says his Archangel training prevented him from losing his mind during the ordeal. After three days, Bannon was returned to Interpol officials in what he calls a "classic spy swap."

Archangel was disbanded in 1989.

"Officials felt Archangel was guilty of vigilantism," Bannon says. "However, the head of Archangel still had a number of operatives that he wanted to slowly work into legitimate work, including me."

Bannon continued to work as an operative for Interpol for the next 10 years, investigating several high profile cases, including the famous raids on the Wonderland Club in "98. In a sophisticated operation, police arrested over 100 people from 12 different countries who belonged to a club in which the guidelines stated that members had to have at least 10,000 sexual pictures of children under the age of 13.

Finally, in "99, Bannon had had enough.

"I wasn't as young as I used to be, I had a daughter, it just wasn't working for me," Bannon says. "I did what a lot of people do when they want to get fired I got really lame at my job. I showed up late, I wouldn't return calls, and it worked."

Returning to mainstream society, however, wasn't easy. "It was like I had post-traumatic stress disorder," Bannon says. "I was almost incapable of functioning in normal society. I couldn't talk about what I did, and everyone I met I was trying to assess if they were child molesters. . . From the day I was recruited into Archangel, I lived in fear. In my book, I purposely wrote about events that happened 20 years ago. So many of those people are dead or in jail or just don't care anymore. I skipped over pretty quickly the events of recent years. I'm not ready to share those just yet."

Where's the Beef?
An amazing story, right? An amazing, incredible, edge-of-your-seat, holy **** kind of story. But is it true? Or is it all just the fantasies of a middle-aged, mild-mannered computer geek? And if it's true, why isn't it making headlines around the world?

A quote from a recent Publishers Weekly review might be one reason: ". . .if there is any truth to be found in this story, his former collaborators on both sides of the law must be allowing its publication only because they realize how completely implausible it all sounds."

Indeed, Bannon's biggest drawback is that he has too good a story. Nonetheless, plenty of folks, including members of the local media (not to mention dozens of starry-eyed fans who showed up at Bannon's recent Borders book signing) believe he's the real deal.

Charlotte Observer reporter Olivia Fortson, who wrote a story about Bannon, says she believes him 100 percent.

Ramona Holloway, who, along with on-air partner Matt Harris (the "Matt and Ramona" show on 107.9 The Link) interviewed Bannon, believes him as well. "Matt is a little skeptical," she says. "But I buy his story hook, line and sinker."

[Sam Browning]

Part III

In Creative Loafing's attempt to get to the bottom of the whole saga, we did the obvious asked for evidence. Bannon and his publisher supplied CL with reams of documents, most of them ancillary copies of news magazine and website stories about Interpol and the fact that the agency targets terrorists and child pornographers; no mention was made, however, of killings by Interpol agents. The publisher also provided some rather oblique documents showing what they allege to be Korean bank statements showing money given to Bannon by Interpol, as well as alleged Interpol papers "seeking to recruit a Crime Intelligence Officer for its Trafficking in Humans Crime Sub-Directorate." The recruitment documents are so specific they even include working hours: "37 1/2 hours a week with a 45-minute lunch break." They were all documents that we or anyone else could have typed up at the office with the help of a Korean dictionary and some creative government doublespeak. There was really nothing conclusive about any of it -- no official Interpol seal, no signature, nothing.

Lynda Hatch, publicity director of New Horizon Press, Bannon's publisher, says that given the clandestine nature of Bannon's assignments, the "trail of evidence is sometimes murky and indistinct," and that "the organization (Interpol) will claim no knowledge of him."

Hatch is right. We contacted Michael Rose, chief press officer for Interpol in Lyon, France. (To date, it appears that CL is the only media outlet to have contacted Interpol to get their reaction to Bannon's book.) When asked to confirm or deny if Bannon had ever worked for Interpol, Rose responded with this official statement:

"Interpol's General Secretariat in Lyon has no record of David Race Bannon having been employed and no knowledge of individuals mentioned in Mr. Bannon's book. Interpol exists to facilitate the exchange of information between the world's law enforcement agencies and to provide analysis of criminal data and other services. Accordingly, if the claims in Mr. Bannon's book are in fact as have been reported to Interpol, they can only be seen as deceptive and irresponsible fantasy."

Bannon says he expected nothing less from Interpol.

"The official Interpol stance has always been that they're really nothing more than a clearing house of data," Bannon says. "It's so simplistic it's almost funny --that they're nothing more than a giant computer. Then why do they need this vast network across 170-plus countries with officers all over the world?" Bannon says the only way to really support his story is through the testimony of others.

CL tried that route as well. In his book, Bannon writes often about Lee Hyung-Jin, who Bannon says is a longtime friend and Korean NIS agent he worked with on many cases. There is a testimonial signed by a Hyung-Jin in Bannon's book, which, in broken English, essentially supports Bannon's story. At our prompting, Bannon said he contacted Hyung-Jin, who he says is now a college professor in South Korea, and asked him to contact us. A few days later, I received an email from a Hyung-Jin that, again, in broken English, backed up Bannon's story, saying his book was "sad but true," and even though he lived a "careful life with a college job," he would talk to CL for the story. In his email, Hyung-Jin indicated Bannon had forwarded him my number, and he would call. I responded and asked what day and time would best fit his schedule. I never heard from him again.

There's also a testimonial in Bannon's book from Jacques Defferre, the man Bannon claims recruited him into Interpol. Bannon said he contacted Defferre and asked him if he could contact CL for this story. Moreover, Fortson of the Observer received an email from Defferre, which she quoted in her story, saying he was angry with Bannon for telling everything to an "unforgiving world," but that Bannon "must write the truth as he must breathe, it is his nature." Fortson, who never spoke to Defferre in person, also forwarded my contact information to Defferre via email. I never heard from him. In fact, CL still doesn't really have any proof that Defferre or Hyung-Jin actually exists.

Bannon has also written several stories for Kungfu Qigong magazine, including one in the November/December 2001 issue about his involvement in the Wonderland Club arrests. In that story, Bannon, using a knife and baton, busted into a hotel room and rescued an 8-year-old girl who had been kidnapped by members of the child pornography network. After the story was published, several people wrote letters to the magazine, some saying the story was absolute hogwash, and others --including, yes, Hyung-Jin and Defferre -- to commend Bannon on a job well done. We tried to contact Martha Burr, who was executive editor of Kungfu Qignong at the time, to ask if she believed Bannon's story. Associate Editor Gene Ching responded, and informed us that Burr no longer worked for the magazine. When we asked Ching if he believed Bannon, he replied, "To be honest, I don't really know. I've never really interacted with Bannon personally so I haven't formed an opinion of him either way. When that article was published we had a few skeptics, but we also had many supporters contact us. I will be very interested in your findings."

Bottom line, Bannon was unable to produce a single document or piece of evidence to prove his claims. But then again, no one has yet to produce a piece of evidence that disproves his story. There is, in fact, no "smoking gun" from either side.

"I wish there were," Bannon says. "It's certainly legitimate for people to ask if this is all real or not. But in the end, people are just going to have to make up their own mind."

Contact Sam Boykin at 704-944-3623 or sam.boykin@cln.com

[Sam Browning]

Insert scanned images of Bannon's arrest warrant.

Edit: Here is the arrest warrant and pages 1 - 7 of the supporting affidavit. Click on the page to enlarge each image.