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This is the beginning of a long-form thread documenting Eye of the Chickenhawk by Simon Dovey — one of the most disturbing and essential books I’ve ever read. The book documents organized child trafficking, state-protected abuse networks, and coverups spanning multiple decades.

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@legalizecrime66

I won’t be sharing graphic details of abuse. The focus is on names, timelines, institutions, and patterns. The goal is to help people understand how systemic these operations are and how often they were protected from the top down.

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I came to this subject through David McGowan’s Programmed to Kill. Though it’s a book about serial killers, McGowan opens with Pedogate — a chapter not about serial murderers, but about elite-run child trafficking rings. That choice tells you everything about his thesis.

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Eye picks up where that chapter left off. It’s a spiritual sequel. The main criticisms of PTK are the lack of citations. That’s not the case here. Dovey references court docs, FOIA files, news reports, & testimony from survivors & law enforcement.

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This thread isn’t meant to summarize the book so you don’t have to read it. I hope it pushes more people to pick it up. Because as disturbing as it is, this history is important. Power doesn’t just exploit, it conceals, protects, and repeats.

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Understanding how these systems operate is necessary if we want to dismantle them. What you’ll see in this thread is a record of how people in powerful positions enabled organized abuse for decades, and how institutions covered it up.

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🧵 EYE OF THE CHICKENHAWK: The underground child abuse scene in the U.S. was structured, documented, and coordinated. Using terms like “chickenhawk” (adult predators) and “cadet” (boy victims), the trade was normalized through mail-order publications and coded networks

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Multiple magazines served as front operations: •Better Life Monthly •Hermes •BLK •Fag Rag These newsletters used code and advocacy rhetoric to obscure actual trafficking and grooming methods.

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One of the most prominent organizers: John David Norman, a convicted pedophile who ran a nationwide sex trafficking operation called The Odyssey Foundation in the 1970s. It was disguised as a “mentorship” program matching adult men with boys for “travel and education.”

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When Dallas police arrested Norman, they found: •Thousands of index cards with names and addresses of clients •Explicit photos •Letters to/from U.S. military personnel, doctors, and government officials •Distribution infrastructure through the mail system

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The cards were handed to the State Department. They were never entered into evidence. They were destroyed in 1975, during the Cold War “cleanup” period. To this day, no investigation has accounted for the network Norman was facilitating.

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Dean Corll, known as the “Candyman,” murdered at least 28 boys in Houston between 1970–73. His known accomplices, Elmer Wayne Henley and David Owen Brooks, confessed that Corll wasn’t just a killer he was a key cog in a network, supplying boys to other Pedophiles.

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According to Henley & Brooks: •Corll delivered boys to an unnamed Dallas-based buyer •The buyer paid in cash •Corll told them he was protected, and if anything happened to him, they would be silenced These claims match Norman’s operational base and timeline.

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Victim photos later recovered from Roy Ames, a Houston pornographer, show at least 11 of Corll’s victims in his stash, including those previously thought “missing.” This links Corll to a pornographic distributor.

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Ames ran a “record label” but was known in underground circles as a producer of child pornography. He had ties to Guy Strait in California and William Byars Jr., heir to the Humble Oil fortune (now Exxon). These names surface repeatedly in U.S. trafficking files.

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In 1973 and 1975, Houston police raided Roy Ames’ warehouse. They seized six tons of illegal material, including: •Photos of Corll’s victims •Mail correspondence •Letters requesting more violent content Ames was convicted, served time, and resumed operations.

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Byars and Strait were key West Coast figures. Strait was arrested multiple times for child porn. Byars had alleged connections to J. Edgar Hoover and was shielded by family wealth. Together, they were the distribution wing. Corll and Ames were the supply chain.

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An ID card and a Houston police report were found buried with one of Corll’s victims — suggesting an attempt to leave a paper trail. The report was never entered into evidence. FOIA requests decades later showed no record of it in HPD files.

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Multiple witnesses tied to Corll, Ames, or Norman were later found dead under mysterious circumstances: •Kenneth Hellstrom — murdered after giving information •Michael Salcido — stabbed to death before testifying •Steven Ahern — vanished No investigations followed.

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Authorities in Texas, & later Illinois often released or redirected known perpetrators without notifying other states. The Odyssey Network continued under new names: •Delta Project •BoyPower •Project Lambda Each absorbed by different mailing hubs and “youth initiatives.”