Lawrence King, a 300-pound pedophile from Nebraska, Gray's home state, was alleged in 1984 to have operated a branch of the call-boy business in partnership with Harold Andersen, then publisher of the Omaha Herald, and a close friend of Gray's. King, a baritone, sang the National Anthem at the 1984 and 1988 Republican conventions.
King enjoyed Republican society and took his conservative politics seriously. In 1987 he donated $25,350 to Citizens for America, an organization that arranged speaking tours around the country for Lt. Col. Oliver North.
In October 1988, King's Franklin Community Credit Union was raided by the FBI and IRS. A month later the Treasury Department filed suit to recover the $34 million that had disappeared from Franklin's vaults under King's management.
Before his arrest, King had commuted often to Washington, D.C. He was a business partner in a call-boy operation run by the late Craig Spence, whose antics were the subject of a week-long series published by the Washington Times in July 1989. The expose was immediately occasioned by the resignation of an aide to Elizabeth Dole. In his resignation letter, the aide complained that one of Spence's male prostitutes, had blackmailed him with threats of disclosure. The Times reported that Spence, a former ABC reporter, was said to have been running a CIA blackmail operation: Spence's Victorian Mansion on Wyoming Avenue, where he often threw parties for Washington's power elite, was "planted with electronic bugs and video recording equipment that, according to homosexual call-boys and others who routinely visited the house, was used to make incriminating tapes to blackmail guests." The parties were attended by the likes of William Casey, Ted Koppel, John Mitchell and Eric Severeid. A political tempest threatened when Spence's credit card receipts implicated Reagan and Bush appointees, but few names reached the public print.
Four months after the story broke, Spence was found dead at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Boston. Police ruled his death a suicide.
Another ramrod in the CIA's male prostitution network was Ronald Roskens, former chancellor of the University of Nebraska. Lawrence King had been one of his closest "advisers." Roskens was fired from the position in 1989 when his involvement in homosexual orgies was reported to the university's board of regents and verified by them. A year later, President George Bush called Roskens to Washington to head the Agency of International Development (AID), commonly utilized as a cover in CIA operations overseas. AID also disburses $7 billion in nonmilitary foreign aid, and thus wields enormous geopolitical power.
In 1992 a 107-page congressional report was issued by Rep. John Conyers Jr., urging Bush to fire Roskens, who had "abused the public trust" for private gain until AID's inspector general "forced a change in his patterns of behavior." His "patterns," according to the Washington Post for October 2, 1992, included "taking thousands of dollars from outside organizations, including some that do business with AID."
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