United States Senator Sam Nunn predicted the unraveling of our society . . . 40 years ago

His 1982 hearings on the massive flow of cocaine coming through the Southeast identified a catastrophic societal breakdown, plus corruption of law enforcement, cultural values and local politicians, which would inevitably result in the destruction of our constitutional democracy. Until 1997,  Nunn was the highly respected Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee and served on the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations and on the Senate Intelligence Committee.  

by Richard L. Thornton, Architect and City Planner

U.S. Senate Hearing Chamber – National Capitol

The bipartisan Investigations Committee listened to testimonies by honest federal, state and local law enforcement administrators, which described how in the previous two years vast sums of drug profits had “bought off” law enforcement, local politicians and civic leaders.  The impact of illegal drug money was particularly severe in southern Florida, southern Texas, northern Georgia and western North Carolina.  Already, hundreds of millions of dollars, both garnered by foreign cartels and organized crime in the United States was being laundered within the United States. The South American and Mexican cartels were getting rich from their business investments in the United States. It was superficially legal money that was difficult to track.

Asheville, NC FBI Agent-In-Charge  Cosby Morgan described how close the Philadelphia and New Jersey Mafia had come to literally owning Downtown Asheville via a sudden tsunami of cocaine profits. I had gone to Cosby in 1980 and began working covertly with him, after I realized that key City Hall officials were in bed with the Mafia.  I was Director of the Asheville Downtown Revitalization Commission.  Many individuals, including the CEO of a national hotel chain, had been threatened by New Jersey Mafia thugs,  after they invested in Downtown properties. The Mafiasi wanted to buy the rest of Downtown Asheville as cheap as possible . . . thus, they wanted its economy to be depressed.

In 1980, over 2,000 demonstrators “wrapped” the boundaries of the sections of Downtown Asheville that its leaders wanted to demolish then essentially give away to “investors.”

Some witnesses from Georgia described the rapid cultural deterioration among young people. The Southern Appalachians, in general, had become a mecca for music and arts.  North Georgia had been considered one of the most progressive regions in the Southeast. Almost overnight the young people had switched from creating beautiful handicrafts or practicing on their banjo to shooting guns or making a fast buck selling drugs.

Ronald Reagan ignored the plea by the Armed Service and Intelligence Committees to stop the flow of cocaine, coming into the United States. We now know that what soon became billions of dollars of investment capital, was pumping up the economy. A severe recession suffocated the U.S. during the first two years of the Reagan Administration. The economy was so improved by the 1984 election that Republicans were soon able to brainwash the public into thinking that the Reagan Recession occurred in the last two years of the Carter Administration. Even when it was proven that a US Air Force general was turning off the Southeast’s radar defense system, when Colombian Cartel planes were about to enter our air space, Reagan’s White House did nothing!

Who is Sam Nunn?

Most readers nowadays would probably not recognize his name, but he was constantly in the news throughout the late 20^th century. Democratic and Republican members of Congress voted him the most respected member of the United States Senate. He has a brilliant mind and is a Southern gentleman . . . in all the positive aspects of that label.  He is a graduate of Georgia Tech, plus earned a law degree from Emory University.  He has always been known as a very rational free-thinker, who didn’t always go along with the official policies of the Democratic Party.

He was seriously considered as a running mate by Bill Clinton, John Kerry and Barrack Obama . . . but his freethinker reputation clearly marked him as no “Yes Man” for any president. After leaving Congress, Nunn co-founded the Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI), a charitable organization, partially funded by Ted Turner, which works to prevent catastrophic terrorist attacks with nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons, for which he is a co-chair.

Samuel Augustus Nunn Jr. was born in Macon, GA in 1938.  He served as one of Georgia’s United States Senators from 1972, until deciding not to run for the Senate again in 1996.  He stated that Congress had changed and become both meanspirited and dysfunctional.   

Like his friend Jimmy Carter,  he cannot be stereotyped with current political labels.  On some issues, in particular, national security and fiscal policies, he is a conservative.  On other issues, he would be considered today, a moderate or progressive.  Throughout his political and professional careers,  Nunn has been concerned about the potential of insane individuals or groups of terrorists to seriously harm our society or cause us to devolve into fascism.   He has frequently stated . . . “If someone or a group are intent on committing suicide in order to kill others,  what can our nation do without becoming a police state?”

I have never had a conversation with Sam Nunn, but once saw him at about 30 feet away at the National Capitol.  It was at the June 1991 cheese tasting for National Dairy Month in the Senate Hearing Chambers.  My girlfriend, Vivi, was wearing a Normandy dairy maid’s outfit.  There was a huge crowd around our table of people wanting to gawk at the pretty French actress.  Sam was at the edge of the crowd then walked on.

How I learned about the Nunn Report

I was promised a year and half ago by a Homeland Security officer that I would not be harassed again by Georgia law enforcement agencies.  They said that they would visit local law enforcement offices and explain to them that I was not a criminal or a sexual predator . . . and in fact, had worked closely with federal law enforcement agencies several times in the past.

Then in March 2022,  I bought a 32” x 48” mini-greenhouse to start vegetable plants in.  As soon as the greenhouse arrived from Amazon.com,  my house was surrounded by as many as eight black-clad members of the Mountain Area Drug Enforcement Task Force for three weeks.  At the end of the three weeks, they went into my house and pulled 84 collards, broccoli and turnip sprouts to test to see if they were marijuana.  I have never grown, bought or sold any illegal substance.   I WAS a federal witness in a case involving an interstate drug cartel, being run by crooked cops in Georgia, Florida and Virginia!

Then exactly a year ago,  I was carrying out major repairs on this house.   I learned that the Habersham County Sheriff’s Department had called Arrow Exterminating,  the electrical contractor, the plumbing contractor and the roofing contractor to tell them that I was a homosexual prostitute, who had “a long history of immoral and criminal behavior.”    However,  those calls to contractors meant that they were still tapping my phone.  The contractors thought that the cops up here must be crazy as loons.   Being socially “up-to-date”, Arrow Exterminating merely changed my contract to an Atlanta Metro office that was run by a highly competent homosexual manager.

In June 2002 an administrator at Georgia Tech contacted me to ascertain my interest in being a part-time professor for architectural history and historic preservation classes.  I was to call the next week to make an appointment to tour the new facilities at the College of Design and meet faculty members. 

When a called, the administrator acted like a gun had been put to her head.  She couldn’t get off the phone quick enough.  No one at the School of Architecture has responded to any of my phone calls or emails since then.  I later learned that a local cop and a Georgia Bureau of Investigation agent had immediately called them to tell them that I was a convicted sexual predator of college-age females!  

Location where the burned body of Debbie Collier was found

The last straw occurred last autumn.  That situation made national headlines.  Debbie Collier, a woman, who I had never met in my life . . . living 70 miles from my house . . .  was found burned to death 21 miles from my house.  The sheriff’s department put officers in a neighbor’s house to watch me 24/7 then their detectives, knowing full well that it was a probable suicide, contacted the FBI to tell them that I was suspected serial killer. 

The investigation for a non-murder dragged on for two months.  In the meantime, responding to a request from the Sheriff’s Department to investigate a probable serial killer, low ranking FBI special agents contacted friends and relatives across the nation. Those contacted included three fraternity brother roommates at Georgia Tech over five decades ago, who I had not seen in 25 years. The investigators presented a bogus description of me made up by the local cops.  The puzzled people were told that I was bisexual, hated women and showing symptoms of extreme anxiety!

Well . . . I asked the man, who responded to my last complaint about crooked Georgia cops, to read my online book, The Shenandoah Chronicles,  which tells about the secret hearings that the US Dept. of Justice ran above a café in Georgetown.  I wanted them to understand how much I sacrificed in Virginia.  I was shot at four times . . . three of the bullets were so close to my head that I could feel the wind.  The fourth one hit my bullet proof windshield.   

They used a different person and a different way to get back to me last week, since local or state law enforcement is now telling managers of all stores where I shop that I run a big shoplifting ring. The store manager should call law enforcement, whenever I shop there, so they can look at the surveillance cameras. Obviously, the rogue cops are trying to find out who my federal contacts are.

The folks at Ingles Supermarket in Cleveland, GA are kornfuzed! First, they cooperated fully with state and local cops, when they said that I was a male prostitute. They then cooperated fully, when they said I was predator of young college women. Six coeds from Truett McConnel University were brought in as decoys, who would amateurishly flirt with me, when I passed through the baked goods displays. They put up extra surveillance cameras in the cereal section when told I was a serial killer. There is nothing more horrific than a dead box of Kellogg’s Raison Bran!

This has happened before. In 1997, I was already getting back on my financial feet in Georgia. I was in a serious relationship with Julie the Sumatran Princess, who I had met in 1995 at Roswell Methodist. I was now a member of Trinity Methodist in Cartersville, GA. Julie stayed with me most weekends, so the people in the church thought we were living together. They said that we could get married there for free and invited Julie to move her Music Studio to the church facilities.

I was Architect for the restoration of some of Cartersville, GA’s most important historic structures. I was on the Bartow County Planning Commission and member of Cartersville’s Board of Zoning Appeals. I was the Planning Consultant for the City of Smyrna’s Downtown Revitalization Program.

Then I moved from a rental house to a purchased house near Downtown Cartersville. The Cartersville Police notified my elderly neighbors that I was a Peeping Tom, who went around at night in army camouflage. They told my neighbors with young children and the nearby Tabernacle Baptist Church that I was a Satanist and sexual predator. A lady across the street from Tabernacle started videotaping me, when I was mowing the lawn. She yelled, “There’s cops all over this county. If we don’t get you, we will!”

A Tabernacle deacon, who looked like Porky the Pig, wearing a straw hat, followed me around town, telling folks that he was an FBI agent investigating me. Fortunately, he told that to an imbedded FBI agent at a local shop. The Cartersville Police also told KKK members that I was an FBI agent. They said that they were going to get me!

Then a strange-looking man, whose pickup pulled up beside me while I was at the intersection. He grinned and said, “Richard, we’re gonna kick you butt!” I raced to the Cartersville Police Station with his tag number. The man was its police chief! He was soon fired for having an affair with a female officer, but not charged with murder, when his other girl friend, who had ratted on him about the female officer, was found floating in Allatoona Lake. Instead the disgraced police chief was hired by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation as a senior level agent!

It started in the 1980s. Last week, the new lady got back to me. This one was in the DEA, not Homeland Security.  She said that there is a major drug ring operating very close to my house and that I should be very careful, since they spotted law enforcement personnel being quite friendly with the criminals.  She also told me that there was an investigation into drug operations, involving local and state cops in North Georgia, that was chaired by Senator Sam Nunn in 1982.  The counties where I have lived, live now or shop now were specifically mentioned as places where the communities’ private sector leadership and law enforcement had been corrupted by drug money.

It took me awhile to find the Nunn Report online. It was an astonishing description of Southeast’s secret past, as it devolved into fascism . . . and an accurate prediction of what was going to happen in the future.  In fact,  the current situation with gun violence and multiple forms of terrorism is far worse than those senators ever dreamed was possible in 1982.

As I was writing this article, the images in my mind went back long ago to my beautiful Shenandoah Valley pasture filled with daisies. It was June 1991 and I was standing in the middle of the pasture with a newly minted Swedish FBI agent and attorney, so young looking that they couldn’t use her in an FBI field office.

Susan had been paired with me so I could transport evidence, provided by honest law enforcement officers in the Shenandoah Valley to the FBI’s headquarters in Washington, DC. We were supposed to fake having an affair. While cuddled in the parking lot of a historic restaurant in Middletown, VA, I would slip her the envelopes or photos. Pretty soon, though, we realized that we were faking having a fake affair. Susan was much more interested in moving from the fake to the real than I was . . . but then the few acquaintances who saw us together all congratulated me on getting out of a toxic marriage.

Looking deep into my soul, Susan anointed me with olive oil from Israel and uttered incomprehensible, ancient Hebrew words. Soon thereafter, she began aggressively pressuring for us to consummate our relationship . . . reminding me that both the Old and New Testaments taught that since the anti-wife had asked for a divorce at least 24 times, had numerous flings and was in a long term affair with a married man . . . in God’s eyes I was single, so it was blessed by God.

There was something odd about her explanations of her past and total ignorance of popular culture that made me always suspect that Susan was NOT from the planet Earth. Yep! I was seduced by a 25 year old, extraterrestrial FBI agent sexual predator, who preyed on naive 42 year old goatherds. Fifteen years later, she suddenly disappeared without a trace, just before she was supposed to move in with me. Did Susan ET call home?

Whatever Susan’s origin . . . Had I known where that path was leading,  I think that I would have run back to the barn and hid out amongst the goats and the sheep.