Staring at the screen I began to have the strangest sensation that I no longer existed in my own life, but had been adsorbed to a thin film of an alternate reality. The day before I had accidentally stumbled into one of the liminal spaces of the Internet, where a quiet, nearly invisible blog had sat waiting for over seven years for someone to find it.
The title of the blog “porter stansberry” graced the top of every post in a demure shade of strawberry-peach. And every post was an almost unintelligible stream-of-consciousness gurgle that babbled and spilled a twisting narrative down the screen. The hummingbird background was shadows of pastel apricots and at odds with the content, which appeared neatly in small font on the palest ice-blue ombre rectangle.
The posts had titles like:
”Raytheon’s “RIOT” Software Tracks Trillions of Pieces of Your Data on Facebook”
“2 Obama Voters Invade Home and Kill Unarmed Homeowner”
“Sandy Hook,Newtown,CT,Israeli Veronique Pozner says Give her money and Plant Israeli Trees on the bodies of Dead Palestinians to honor Noah”
“Stop The Government Plan For Radioactive Cookware!”
The posts began in July of 2012 and continued until February of 2013, with two notable exceptions.
It’s not hyperbole to write that this is perhaps one of the most bizarre blogs I’ve ever seen in my life. And I would go on to discover that it contains a secret, or rather, several, including the identity of the author. Make no mistake. The name of the blog may be “porter stansberry” but he almost certainly isn’t the creator of this strange, little site.
But first, some context.
Like many of you may have, I first heard about the Rey Rivera case via Crime Junkies just a few days shy of the Netflix reboot of Unsolved Mysteries.
Curious, I began poking around the Internet, certain that something was indeed off about Rey’s death; from the trajectory he would have had to achieve, to the odd impact hole, the mystery call just before he ran out of his home, to his friend, Porter Stansberry’s uncooperative behavior after his body was found (if you happen to be unfamiliar with the case both the Crime Junkies and Sinisterhood podcasts as well as the Unsolved Mysteries episode are excellent, and I highly recommend them).
Entering the query “Porter Stansberry”+”Masonic” I came across a blog and a post titled “Juerg Heer,Roberto calvi,UK masons, rothschild, etc.” and then, under that, “CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS COINER Bernard Lewis’.” [sic]
The entire post was cut and pasted content about the most Kafkaesque financial scandal I’ve ever heard of involving an Italian man named Roberto Calvi, nicknamed ‘God’s Banker’, for his oversight of some of the Vatican’s accounts. Bear with me. This may seem like it doesn’t have anything to do with Rey Rivera. But it does, at least in the mind of the blog author.
His troubles began when he joined a group. Not just any group. No, a secret one, of course, and if you’re already familiar with Rey Rivera’s case, then you know which group. The Freemasons.
But this wasn’t just any Freemason lodge, oh no. This was Propaganda Due (P2) and it boasted not only the prominent and powerful, but members of criminal organizations. Joining was incredibly prestigious. Members referred to themselves as frati neri, or black friars, for the black robes they supposedly wore to meetings and ceremonies.
Calvi’s initiation into this cabal allowed him to set up a financial scandal so peculiar that if wasn’t for the fact that it’s well documented in reputable publications I wouldn’t have believed it (When the Apparent Suicide Of ‘God’s Banker,’ Roberto Calvi, Was Ruled A Murder and ITALY’S MYSTERIOUS, DEEPENING BANK SCANDAL).
Calvi’s inexorable topple towards the end of a rope began with an act of revenge. A fellow banker who felt wronged by Calvi papered banners all over Milan accusing his bank of serious financial irregularities. An investigation followed and a trial found Calvi guilty of transferring billions of lire illegally out of the country. At the time, the amount was around $27,000,000 USD; today it would be well over $100,000,000 USD. This money had been funneled from Calvi’s bank to an offshore, shell company called Bellatrix, which then diverted this money to members of P2.
It would later be revealed that this was only the tip of the iceberg, and Calvi played a role in funding dangerous regimes around the world, as well as illicitly lining the pockets of the already over-rich.
Calvi was out on appeal when he decided to flee Italy. Eventually, he made his way to London, although his ultimate destination was to be Washington, D.C. where his wife was already residing. On June 17, 1982, Calvi called his daughter in Switzerland and urged her to join her mother. It was the last time they spoke.
The next day the body of a man who’s passport named him as Gian Roberto Calvini was found hanging from the Blackfriars Bridge. He was dressed in a suit accessorized with an expensive watch. His pockets contained 12 pounds of rocks and $13,000 in assorted currencies.
The man, who detectives concluded had completed suicide, was of course, Roberto Calvi. The previous day, his secretary, Graziella Corrocher, apparently also completed suicide by falling out of a window at Calvi’s former bank’s Milan headquarters.
It took 20 years for Calvi’s suicide to be overturned and finally ruled a homicide. Five men even stood trial in 2007, but were all acquitted. Their acquittal was upheld on appeal. Another investigation was launched in 2008 and only finally concluded in 2016, completely unresolved. Too much time had elapsed for any justice to be meaningfully pursued.
An apparent suicide that turned out to be murder?
A massive financial scandal perpetrated by insiders?
Ties to a powerful Masonic Lodge that some have referred to as a shadow government?
All this, on a blog created by Porter Stansberry?
It didn’t make sense.
When I really started looking at the rest of the blog I realized there was no way this could possibly have been put together by Porter.
Most ostensibly, all the navigation buttons and dates of posts were in a foreign language, which turned out to be Turkish. As far as I could find, Porter Stansberry has no obvious ties to Turkey or even speaks or understands Turkish, for that matter.
Another irregularity: there was no original content. Every single post was cut and pasted from other blogs. And as exampled above, the content was very unusual. Many of the posts were no more than the comments section from other sites, often involving two improbably offbeat characters- Tony Ryals and Lila Rajiva (both individuals clearly have brains built from recycled conspiracy theories pasted together with an eye-watering amount of anti-Semitism). I only bring them up because it is within this context that Rey Rivera’s name and death comes up in passing several times.
At this point I hadn’t yet gotten that uneasy feeling of unreality in my stomach. That didn’t come until I realized that many of the posts on the blog were reposted over and over and over again. This blog began to take on a distinct artificial flavor. It felt like a deliberate construction meant to convey something of importance, but what it is still remains elusive.
If you’re familiar with the game Forever Lost than you’ll understand what I mean when I say I began to feel as though I had accidentally slipped into something similar. If you’ve never played it (and you should) it’s essentially a mystery game where you wake up in an abandoned asylum and must reconstruct who you are and what happened by solving puzzles and slowly piecing clues together, which often come in the form of some kind of communication: post-it notes, writing on walls and furniture, secret messages in books, a Google-like search, an invoice, even an old TV guide.
Going through the repeating and unsettling posts on the “porter stansberry” blog that’s what I felt like. Like I was trying to piece together a narrative from torn bits of information, but not to solve a crime, but to win a game. It felt disconcerting and macabre.
And then it got even stranger.
I clicked on the blog author page and it was completely anonymous. Not so unusual. However, it did list an additional 13 blogs by the same author.
And here’s when the bizarre kicked up several decibels.
Only seven of the other blogs had any content, and once again, it appeared to all be cut and pasted from other authors, no original content.
On the “True Credit” blog, two different posts, both titled “I’m Alive”, and two other posts, “No Refinance Under Obama’s Plan…” and “Asia’s Data Explosion” were reposted around 47 times. The same posts just over and over and over and over and over again.
Reading through each “I’m Alive” post it was clear they had been written much earlier, and now the feeling like I was playing out a game in real life began to transition to the sensation that I was being propelled deeper into someone’s psychosis.
Nothing made sense.
There was no true cohesive narrative.
No explanations.
Over about six months, someone had deliberately taken the time to create 14 blogs, and post on eight of them regularly. So much so, that the total number of posts between all the blogs added up to 4,635. An absolutely mindboggling amount of posts. Roughly 25 a day, every day, for around 180 days.
Was the author aware that they were reposting the same content over and over again? Or was it through a series of fractured thought processes that couldn’t recall what had been done the day before? And just as important as why they had started, why had they stopped?
Between a blog titled “porter stansberry” that was clearly NOT by Porter Stansberry, the odd composition of the various blogs, the post about Roberto Calvi, and the several mentions of Rey Rivera I thought that I should let someone connected to the case know about it, because it just felt like if the right person looked at it, they might be able to figure out something important. Maybe even something linked to Rey Rivera’s death.
As I was preparing my email, I started to scroll down the “porter stansberry” blog looking for the original post that had drawn me into this whole clutter of what-the-fuck. I couldn’t find it. I searched the side scroll through each month looking for it. Then I did it again. Then again. I still couldn’t find it.
I started to get nervous that even though the blog had been quiescent for over seven years that maybe the author had recently deleted that post. Luckily, I had copied it into a Word document, along with the link, for just such a reason.
I pulled up the link in my browser, and it was still there. Ok. That’s weird.
Then I noticed the date. Translated, it was Sunday, September 16, 2012. But something didn’t feel right. I went to the first post listed under September, “Charles Biderman: “Local Governments & States Hiding Entitlement Funding Gap Data”.
The date: Friday, September 21, 2012.
And suddenly I realized why I hadn’t been able to find the post on the side scroll. The post absolutely existed on the blog. It’s just, the author had deliberately hidden it.
