I now am appending three more pages of Newsletter No. 31 with significant annotations by CIA analyst Dr. Frederick Von Bodungen. These are pages 4, 8, and 12.
To make sense of all this, some additional clarification is in order based on my subsequently improved understanding of three clandestine operations since the Newsletter initially was released in 1991.
First, beginning in the late 1960s and continuing at least into the 1980s, Tucson / Phoenix Mafia groups were engaged in a successful money laundering operation using desert land in Arizona’s Cochise County near Willcox.
Second, over roughly 1968 to 1982, the same Arizona organized crime factions also conducted sizeable diversions of gold, along with some platinum, from a large Motorola semiconductor plant in Phoenix. The stolen precious metals initially went to a salvage yard in suburban Mesa, Arizona, called Mesa Materials. They next went to a reclamation company in Santa Ana, California, called Gemini Industries. Then, after being processed into standard commercial ingots, they came back to Arizona for storage and sale in the international black market.
Third, beginning in the early 1970s and extending into the mid-1980s, the CIA itself was involved in moving huge amounts of Asian gold into the international black market as well. This was gold stolen by the Japanese military in China, French Indo-China, Singapore, and the Philippines during World War II. As the conflict was coming to an end, the Japanese military buried that “war booty” at various locations in the Philippines, a lot of it also at sites in the vicinity of Cam Ranh Bay in what became South Vietnam.
At the end of World War II, the OSS, forerunner of the CIA, had managed to acquire the burial maps from Japanese authorities. Once removed and recovered by the CIA, this would provide the agency with an off-the-books “slush fund” of hundreds of billions of dollars for use outside of congressional knowledge and oversight. It clearly was a highly classified operation, helped along by President Richard Nixon’s deregulation of gold in the early 1970s, allowing its value to soar in free market speculation.
Early in the process, the CIA quietly made a deal with Arizona Mafia leader Joe Bonanno to funnel some of the Asian gold through his already existing black market reclamation and sales operation, including Gemini Industries in California and ensuing Tucson-based marketing. Along the way, the mob folks involved got a commission and immunity from related federal prosecution for the duration.
Tucson escrow agent and mob associate Charles Morgan was deeply engaged in all three of these clandestine operations until his murder in 1977. Phoenix reporter Don Bolles was investigating the first and second of them as an off-shoot of his effort to unmask the Mafia’s silent partnership in Arizona Greyhound racing, skim money from which was being used to cover initial costs of the mob’s Motorola precious metals diversion, until his fatal car-bombing in 1976. And Virginia freelancer Danny Casolaro was digging into the third of these, the CIA’s covert wealth from black market gold sales, until his murder in 1991.
In reviewing some of Morgan’s records from the 1970s before his death, the black market buyers of such gold (and some platinum) looked to be either banks or law firms which, when I contacted them, hid behind “client confidentiality” regarding the identities of those they were representing. Whoever the latter variously may have been, it appears that some of this precious metal was ending up in a large underground vault for such purposes at Kloten, Switzerland, near Zurich, available for international customers.
The appended CIA-annotated pages confirm the following:
(1) The existence of the huge CIA clandestine recovery of Asian gold in which Morgan was involved and Casolaro was investigating.
(2) The FBI’s false denial to me in the 1980s of any records involving Morgan’s death being based, as I suspected, on CIA gold-related “national security” grounds.
(3) Unlike Casolaro, as I also suspected, Morgan’s murder was, “mob-related only not gov!” Since Morgan had become a CIA asset of sorts, I’m not surprised that the agency took the trouble to find out what happened to him.
(4) Bolles’ “investigating the theft of industrial gold from Motorola” was known by the CIA. Bolles’ widow Rosalie had told me that they had a close, CIA-connected family friend.
Don Devereux
Yountville, California
October 20, 2026
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Copyright © 2026 Don Devereux, All Rights Reserved
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