He also was a collector like his friend, the billionaire pedophile.

It has been more than three days, but there has been a resurrection.

When the original death announcement was made, there were a fair number of people who didn’t really believe this person was dead.

However, in the intervening half decade, and with no sighting of the person, the number of believers he was alive, shrank.

The person who supposedly died was a bigamist.

He also was a collector like his friend, the billionaire pedophile.

The pair were introduced by one of the women the man was married to.

That woman is a sister of the the madam/procurer/sexual assaulter.

The death of the man coincided with what would have been a blitz of negative media.

All of his wealthy and powerful friends would have been forced to distance themselves from him.

In a recent investigation by the federal government that resulted in indictments, it was discovered that not only was one of the people indicted in contact with the “dead” man, but also this former child actor turned accused pedophile/accused rapist/accused child po.rn producer/shady businessman/presidential candidate.

Died/Collector: Al Seckel – died in 2015
as an American collector and popularizer of visual and other types of sensory illusions, who wrote books about them. He was active in the Freethought movement as a skeptic in the 1980s

Billionaire pedophile: Jeffrey Epstein

Madam: Ghislaine Maxwell

Sister: Isabel Maxwell

Indicted: Steve Bannon

Presidential candidate: Brock Pierce

The Illusionist
Al Seckel has left the country. But the world’s greatest collector of optical illusions left some troubles behind.

Estranged from Caltech, Seckel’s ambitions grew. In 2010, he hosted a private scientific conference on a Caribbean island owned by Jeffrey Epstein, a shadowy financier, and sex criminal, who had been the subject of a Vanity Fair profile. To be clear, unlike Epstein, neither Seckel nor any of his guests has been accused, let alone convicted, of using the island for sexual trysts with underage girls; they were taking a free trip and a chance for good conversation. Gell-Mann confirmed that he was there with Seckel, but, now quite aged, could not remember why (“It was just a little island,” he said). So were the physicist Leonard Mlodinow, Stephen Hawking’s co-author, who did not reply to my inquiry, and Gerald Sussman of MIT, who confirmed that he was there. “I don’t really remember very much,” Sussman said. “We had scientific discussions, talked about various things.” Only afterward, he said, did he even learn that Epstein had served time for having sex with an underage prostitute. “I got invited, I said, ‘Gee that’s interesting, I know nothing about Mr. Epstein or anything else. But if a rich man wants to talk about science, why not just get on a plane and go?’” When asked if he had ever given money to Seckel, Sussman got testy. “I have had some dealings with him. I don’t want to say what it’s about, because I don’t feel good about it, OK?”

In 2004, Seckel gave an early TED talk, on optical illusions. In the video, which is still online and has been viewed more than 1.5 million times, he shows a series of illusions, including the famous one in which a naked man holding a naked woman can, seen another way, be interpreted as a group of dolphins. It’s an engaging talk—Seckel is confident and energetic, cracking the audience up with a joke about how Caltech students always see the dolphins. On TED’s website, Seckel is identified as a “cognitive neuroscientist.”

Seckel first met Isabel Maxwell on a blind date. They married around 2007—“I don’t keep the dates in my head,” he told me—in Malibu. She is the daughter of Robert Maxwell, the English press baron who drowned in the Atlantic Ocean in 1991, after falling off (or jumping from) his yacht. She is also the sister of Ghislaine Maxwell, who is a close friend of Jeffrey Epstein and the woman alleged to have procured girls for him (hence, it would seem, the connection between Seckel and Epstein’s island). Although the Maxwells’ father had been a billionaire, at the time of his death he was facing severe financial hardships, which were gleefully covered in the newspapers of his archrival, Rupert Murdoch. Isabel and Ghislaine are two of his nine children. In addition to co-founding Magellan, the early web search engine, Isabel has been a film producer and an advisor to Muhammad Yunus, the microfinance guru.

Sometime about five years ago, Maxwell and Seckel moved to the south of France to care for her ailing mother, who died in 2013. They have stayed in France, and Seckel told me he doesn’t miss California. “Where I live now, there is less emphasis on appearance,” he said. “No one cares about … how great a house I live in, what kind of clothes I have, what kind of car I drive, that kind of stuff.” But the lawsuits reach him, even overseas. One suit, brought by Ensign Consulting Ltd., a firm based in the Virgin Islands, accused Seckel and Maxwell of perpetrating a fraud involving “the purchase of antique rare books and a portrait of Sir Isaac Newton painted in 1689.” The details involve an allegedly false promise by Seckel that, if Ensign lent him the money to acquire this painting, he would re-sell it to Nathan P. Myhrvold, the former Microsoft executive. Ensign accused Seckel of absconding with over half a million dollars of the firm’s money. Myhrvold did not respond to a request for comment, and in March 2014 Ensign dropped the case. The files have been sealed by the court, and the only trace of them in the public record is a news article by a web service, which has seen been taken down.

Lately Seckel has been trying to sell the papers of Robert Maxwell, his late father-in-law, but so far he hasn’t found a buyer. He seems to have plenty of time, and in our Skype encounters last year, before he grew suspicious of me, he was a prodigious talker. Sometimes he floated a new story, a new bit of grandiosity, as if I were the mirror and he was trying to see if the story fit him. Did I know, he asked me, that he was the one who first gave Richard Dawkins the idea to attack creationism? Did I know that he gave Peter Diamandis the idea to fund James Cameron’s underwater exploration? (“I met Al Seckel many years ago, I think in San Diego and in the company of Francis Crick,” Dawkins told me in an email. “I’m afraid I have no recollection of our conversation except that he did a conjuring trick.”) – Source

Ex-child actor explains long-shot bid for presidency: ‘We need leadership that can reunite us’

Entrepreneur and former child actor Brock Pierce touted his presidential candidacy Wednesday, telling Fox Business Network’s “Mornings with Maria” that he and rapper Kanye West could unite behind a “powerful message” for Americans during the coronavirus pandemic.

“Kanye and I are clearly tapping into the same thing and [I’m] really excited to see his — his running as well,” said Pierce, referring to West’s tweet last week announcing his bid for the White House.- Source

The Strange Saga of Jeffrey Epstein’s Link to a Child Star Turned Cryptocurrency Mogul

How Brock Pierce ended up as an Epstein guest along with a NASA computer engineer, an MIT professor and a Nobel laureate in theoretical physics is a bizarre tale involving Steve Bannon and an international man of mystery who may or may not be dead.

Feb. 14, 3 pm PST Editor’s Note: In this article, THR reports on allegations about Brock Pierce relating to a lawsuit that was filed in 2000. Many of the allegations regarding Pierce in this lawsuit were later recanted, and one of the plaintiffs was convicted of fraud. Two witnesses testified that two plaintiffs had offered them substantial sums to testify falsely in the suit against Pierce. A full statement from Pierce can be found here.

Even before Jeffrey Epstein’s mysterious death Aug. 10, many people who knew him were hoping the world would forget or, better yet, never learn that they had any association at all with the notorious predator.

One such person may be serially self-reinventing entrepreneur Brock Pierce, who as a teenager co-founded the eventually infamous Digital Entertainment Network and who, in the mid- to late ‘90s, was associated with an alleged sex-abuse ring — this one involving young men. Several later contended in court filings that Pierce and two associates had drugged and assaulted them at parties in their Encino mansion. Pierce was never charged with any crime and has repeatedly denied wrongdoing. He settled with one plaintiff, and two others dismissed their cases against him.

In early 2011, about a decade after the Digital Entertainment Network imploded, Pierce visited the Virgin Islands to attend “Mindshift,” a conference of top scientists hosted by Epstein. A representative for Pierce says he didn’t even know who Epstein was when he flew (commercial) to the event, which the financier had arranged as part of his elaborate effort to launder his lurid reputation. It was not even 18 months after Epstein had completed his slap-on-the-wrist solicitation sentence in Florida and registered as a sex offender.

The rep for Pierce says he saw Epstein after that meeting “a few times over the intervening years at industry events, where many other prominent people were present.” He adds that “the few communications that Mr. Pierce had with Epstein related to cryptocurrency” — an area in which Pierce established himself as a crypto centimillionaire, or maybe a billionaire, in the years following the conference.

Nothing suggests that anything of a sexual nature or anything untoward at all occurred at Mindshift. Pierce is only one of dozens of figures in Epstein’s dizzyingly vast network, and the link between the two may be nothing but a curiosity. But it is a strange tale: how a former child actor who never went to college ended up as an Epstein guest — a seemingly unlikely addition to a group that included a NASA computer engineer, an MIT professor of electrical engineering and a Nobel laureate in theoretical physics. “I don’t know what he had to do with science [or] why he was there,” says one person who attended.- Source

Steve Bannon, three others charged with fraud in border wall fundraising campaign

(CNN)New York federal prosecutors on Thursday charged President Donald Trump’s former adviser Steve Bannon and three others with defrauding donors of hundreds of thousands of dollars as part of a fundraising campaign purportedly aimed at supporting Trump’s border wall.

Bannon, 66, was arrested at 7:30 a.m. Thursday near Westbrook, Connecticut, on the yacht of exiled Chinese dissident Guo Wengui, according to two law enforcement officials. Federal agents, officials from the United States Postal Inspection Service and the United States Coast Guard, assisted, officials said.

During an initial court appearance in New York later Thursday, Bannon pleaded not guilty and was set to be released on bail including a $5 million bond to be secured by $1.75 million in cash or real property. As part of his bail conditions, he will be prohibited from travel on private airplanes, yachts or boats without permission from the court. – Source