In the summer of 1976, an Illinois oilman named Ed Atkins received a tape containing an explosive conversation: former President Lyndon B. Johnson admitting to moving stolen gold from White Sands Missile Range to his ranch in Mexico. Discussing the heist with Fred Drolte, LBJ explicitly detailed using a big plane—later identified as a B-24 Liberator bomber—to transport the gold, cementing the tape as a "smoking gun" of presidential theft. However, after Atkins handed the tape to his lawyer, Daryl Holmes, for safekeeping, Holmes died under mysterious circumstances in 1977. Following his death, the LBJ tape and Atkins' White Sands files were the only items stolen from the lawyer's office.

This episode begins to dive deep into the origins of these presidential gold heists, proving the corruption began well before the 1973 Nixon theft. We trace the pattern back to the early 1960s at Fort Huachuca in Arizona, where President John F. Kennedy authorized $10,000 in taxpayer money to fund a treasure excavation. When Ed Atkins and his son John finally gained access to dig at the base years later, they found nothing. A base security guard later revealed the shocking truth: the military had previously cordoned off the area and extracted the gold using military trucks and helicopters.

At the center of the Fort Huachuca extraction was Bill Shriver, a civilian operative working under military and CIA supervision. Schriever secretly extracted an estimated 3.5 million troy ounces of gold from Fort Huachuca long before civilian treasure hunters were granted permission to dig, laundering the proceeds through a company called Pyramid Enterprises. In a sworn 1981 affidavit, Schriever confessed that a staggering 11 million troy ounces of gold were taken from Fort Huachuca and Victoria Peak combined, exclusively using military aircraft.

The pursuit of this truth came with a deadly price. Less than a year after giving his sworn testimony, Bill Shriver was beaten to death in Los Angeles. Ed Atkins himself had been warned that his entire family would be killed if he didn't stop investigating White Sands, and he later died in 1979 under circumstances a CIA operative suspected was murder. Tune in to uncover how Fort Huachuca established the dark, deadly template for presidential treasure theft that ultimately paved the way for the Victoria Peak heist. Join us for this latest episode as we tell the story so well documented by author John Clarence.