The Dominion of Melchizedek: The "Mothership for Con Artists Worldwide"
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Ryan Reynolds here for, I guess, my 100th Mint commercial. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. I mean, honestly, when I started this, I thought I'd only have to do like four of these. I mean, it's unlimited premium wireless for $15 a month. How are there still people paying two or three times that much? I'm sorry.

I'm sorry, I shouldn't be victim blaming here. Give it a try at midmobile.com slash save whenever you're ready. $45 upfront payment equivalent to $15 per month. New customers on first three month plan only. Taxes and fees extra. Speeds lower above 40 gigabytes. See details. It's 1995. The world is beginning to understand the horrors of Rwanda's genocide. The Aum Shinrikyo cult kills eight people in Tokyo subway. And an extremist murders Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.

Out on a remote corner of the South Pacific, though, another deadly conflict is brewing. France has spent decades detonating thermonuclear devices off the coasts of its colonial possessions in French Polynesia. And it handles opposition with all the deafness of a Parisian football fan. See the deadly 1985 bombing of Greenpeace ship the Rainbow Warrior, for example. Something French operatives neatly codename Operation Satanique.

Protests erupt across the Pacific region, from New Zealand to Niue. But one state takes it several steps further. The Dominion of Melchizedek, named for a briefly mentioned Talmudic king, is impossible to find on a contemporary world map.

Its US embassy is little more than a Washington DC mail drop and its diplomatic core a cast of oddballs, misfits and scoundrels scattered in places from California to Hong Kong like con man confetti.

Their chief is a US citizen by the name of Mark Pedley, though he's long since changed that to something a little more snappy: Semak Ben David Netzer Korem, or Branch Vinedresser, naturally, for short. More on that later.

Byndretta and his dominions only apparent land holding is a 14 square mile Gilligan-esque island somewhere near the Marshall Islands, which it claims to have bought the previous year for a king's ransom of $5 million.

That still puts it thousands of miles from the underground bunker shafts on Fangatofa Atoll that are about to be pounded with a nuclear device of almost 100 kilotons, around eight times the size of the Little Boy bomb dropped on Hiroshima in August 1945.

Bindressa, though, isn't one for the nuances of Pacific geography. And as protests roil on Auckland, Paris and elsewhere, the Dominion of Melchizedek issues a flaming hot missive to newspapers and embassies worldwide. Quote, under the constitution of the Dominion of Melchizedek, war has been declared on France.

The declaration is made on behalf of all mankind. It is with reluctance that the Polynesian Melchizedek Dominion declares war on France since up till recently France was considered a silent ally. The Ruthenian Melchizedek Dominion is considering aiming at France the nuclear weapons left behind in the Carpatho Mountains by the Soviet Union as leverage in the war.

The indication is that our people in Ruthenia are threatening to do that without our approval, he writes. We're caught in a dichotomy. Our principles are peace and to use nuclear weapons would run against our ideas. We want to establish the government on Earth that would be a model for other governments to follow.

Responding in a Washington Post article, the French are, well, very French indeed. I have nothing to say, says French U.S. Embassy spokesman Jean-Christophe Bellard. Of course, he adds, I feel a great deal of emotion now. We are probably at war. I may be called at any minute to fight. Then, holding back fits of laughter, he admits, quote, I follow matters quite closely and I haven't been informed of this.

Global nuclear holocaust perhaps averted, Weindresser will later play down the declaration as a bizarre printing error. We were only discussing it and somehow it turned into a press release, he says, oblivious, it seems, to the existence of pens, letters, emails or even human consciousness. Weindresser's it's a prank excuse may be funny,

But the truth behind the dominion of Melchizedek is anything but. And, country or not, it's been causing havoc across the world far longer than the fallout from a French nuclear bomb. Well, actually, that's not true at all. It's incredibly funny too. And it all begins back in the 1980s, when an American father and son scams the duo Go On The Lamb, skipping the Mexican border and laying the foundations of a wild new religion. Welcome to the Underworld Podcast.

Hello everyone, this is the podcast where two journalists sitting in small apartment bedrooms regale you with tales of high crime and journalistic mishaps from Long Island to Harlong Bay. I'm Sean Williams in Te Whanganui, Atara, and I'm joined by Danny Gold on a city block in Lenapehoking, apparently. Let's cancel Brooklyn. Much going on your end? Fancy telling us more about your recent exploits in Chicago?

I don't know if anyone understands when you say those place names, but maybe our seven listeners in New Zealand get a kick out of it. There's a few, Marty, yeah. Yeah, you know, Chicago was good. Definitely not going to be one of those doc series that's glamorizing the mafia like some of the darkest interviews I've ever done.

But Chicago's great, man. Wish I spent more time there. Amazing city. Yeah, never been. Well, I did go once and someone stopped me going into the city. Anyway, as always, Patreon's rumbling along with bonuses and a host of interesting crimes and characters. The Instagram's there as always. We've got longs and shorts up on the YouTube. Yeah, I think our TikTok actually got taken down, which is absurd. It's like videos of Hitler getting millions of likes and somehow our account gets deactivated.

I think the CCP is after us. It has to be. And we should get in on the, like, they're censoring us grift. Do you think...

If we try that out, we can get more Patreon subscribers. If you went on Rogan and said that, I think we would double Aaron Tate overnight. But yeah, let's do it. Let's do it. We should send out a few emails. I mean, I appreciate anything you guys can give us towards our work too, not just Rogan. And that'll include some more reporting stuff in the near future, including the second part of this episode, by the way. Been having some pretty mad...

Kind of mad, kind of boring, but I won't make them boring for you guys. Conversations about sovereign citizens. But if you can't give us a few bucks, then please do like, share, subscribe. All that stuff helps us out a ton.

So hold on to your butts, guys, because this one has got pretty much everything. Archdukes in China, self-scribed Bibles, Philippine gold mining, Vegas slots, Idi Amin's mansion, stolen rubies, penny stocks, and of course, a narrowly averted nuclear war in the Pacific Ocean.

Now, the dominion of Melchizedek is many things. But here is SF Weekly's Peter Jameson from a 2011 feature titled Fantasy Island, which I'll be coming back to a lot in the second part. It's really great. Quote, the dominion of Melchizedek, according to government authorities, was intended to act as a sort of mothership for con artists worldwide, issuing fake banking licenses, passports and other documents to lend a veneer of official authenticity to fraud schemes.

Everything about it is phony, says John Shockey, former head of the fraud unit for the US controller of the currency. Mothership for con artists is kind of, like worldwide, it sounds pretty awesome. I'd hop on board that.

Hey, I mean, you pay your money, you get your passport. So, yeah, just reach out. They're still going. According to the Dominion's website, and like I say, this thing is very much alive and kicking. It is a, quote, ecclesiastical sovereign state, which is essentially trying to emulate the Vatican or the Knights Templar, which at various stages in history were nations without land.

Now, I've spoken at length with the Dominion's current leader so I can give a little insight into what he thinks it is. Wait, you're speaking to him? Didn't you just learn your last grifter lesson with like a $100 million lawsuit hanging over your head? Man, the amount of freaks and crazies that have popped out of the woodwork since I wrote that Rolling Stone article is pretty insane. But yeah, I can probably go into a bit of that in next week's episode because he is an interesting guy.

Some very strident views, as you might expect. But basically, we are in the world of micronations, which, if you like writing quirky magazine features as we both do, it's pretty much a goldmine. According to the dictionary, a micronation or a microstate is, quote, a small area or political entity that claims national sovereignty but is not recognized by other sovereign states.

It's a pretty wide remit. There are over 100 of these things worldwide. And folks have founded them for a wide number of reasons, both highfalutin and low. The most common reason is, cheers Occam, narcissism. And you've got tons of men, and they're all men, of course, calling themselves the king of this, the grand duke of that. Guys who like to parade around like Sacha Baron Cohen's dictator in a party city outfit, printing Comic Sans constitutions on fools cap.

It's basically an alliance of neckbeards. There's even a biennial conference for these guys called Microcon, which actually happened this year in Chicago. You should have caught that when you were there. The next one's in 2025, apparently. It's going to be hosted by the Aerecan Empire. They've neatly taken out the M. Clever guys. The New Graviate of St. Castin and the Principality of St. Cretosia in Montreal, Canada. Oh, yeah, we're going for sure.

I mean, we actually are. Given there's already a bit of a separatist movement in Quebec, you might have guessed these are not unrecognized states like Tibet, Bougainville, Abkhazia or West Papua. They're not signatories to the UMPO, even if their founders think they're just as important.

Anyway, beyond the neckbeards, you've got fascist nutcase micronation founders. That would be Peter Fitzek, for example, in Germany, a martial arts tutor and member of the so-called Reichsbürger or Citizens of the Kingdom movement that coalesced with QAnon and other anti-vax conspiracy theorists during COVID to form a kind of

tinfoil hat alliance. I actually traveled around Germany and wrote about it a couple years back with my pal Florian Neuhoff for GQ. I've stuck it on the reading list for Patreon subscribers. Oh yeah, I know Florian from Iraq. Really? Did you meet up in Erbil? Yeah, we met a couple times there for sure. Oh cool, yeah, he's in Berlin. We've done a bunch of reporting together. The Reichsbürger movement, they basically believe that

that modern Germany is actually a company created by the Allies and, of course, the Jews. At the end of the Second World War, you see these guys waving old red, white and black Kaiserreich flags at protests. Others have an affinity for a different Reich altogether.

Last December, cops broke up a plot to overthrow the German state and installed a dictatorship headed by an obscure German aristocrat. And others have followed police plots to carry out a so-called day X of bloodletting on migrants. So it's not all fun and games. Anyway, I'm heading off track. Peter Fitzek, King Peter, the martial arts guy. He actually offered me to show me around his eye in 2021, then backed out the coward.

small town near Berlin, handful of loyal devotees, and he's alleged to have pwned folks out of $1.4 million over the years.

I should have done a piece on him, but Businessweek, right, it beat me to the punch. As you may already have guessed, a lot of this is tied up in the sovereign citizens movement, which honestly, I just can't be getting into too much detail here, but it's all very new world order conspiracy. And it often ends up with some form of anti-Semitism. Yeah, there's a dude in my neighborhood who was always trying to get me to get on some sovereign citizen stuff.

He's actually like an amazing dog trainer, but he's always got like his laminated documents in his backpack, you know, telling me he doesn't pay taxes and I don't have to pay taxes if I join up. And he's like squatting in some townhouse he took over because his laws are different or something like that. I actually, I don't even know if he's a sovereign citizen or like a black nationalist offshoot, but nice guy. You know, he had a, like an eight month old Belgian Malinois. That's the last time I saw him. And it was like impeccably trained. Just a beautiful dog. Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, it usually comes down to one, a couple of things, right? So you're, I don't want to pay tax or I'm an anti-Semite. I would suggest that given the amount of times Zelensky's come up in the conversations with the guy runs the Dominion these days, I think it's probably a combination of both.

There's a ton of micronations in Australia where the indigenous sovereignty movement seems to have gathered pace around a decade ago, which is really interesting. There are folks who claim territories to raise awareness about climate change, like Grand Duke Travis McHenry, a US Navy vet who's cleaved off a big chunk of unclaimed Antarctica as Westarctica.

Incidentally, on October 29, 2017, West Arctica, alongside its ally King Timothy of the Kingdom of Shiloh in Scotland, launched a full-scale invasion of the nation of Kalsahara in the central Californian Carrizo Plain, deposing its despotic 12-year-old viceroy, Nicholas, who just happens to be Grand Duke's son.

Anyway, there's a whole host of micronations that have grown out of local planning disputes. Guys proclaiming an independent state to avoid paying the gas bill or hotel owners who don't want to pay tourist taxes and it goes on. There's a BDSM resort in the town of Cherna in the Czech Republic called the Otherworld Kingdom. There are kibbutzes and hippie communes, jokes and attempts to reinstate fallen bloodlines. There's famously Sealand in the UK, which is an old naval defense tower from the war. There's loads of things happening.

smoke a joint, fall down a Wikipedia hole. It's pretty much, that's quite a good night. Anyway, there's a kind of micronation that exists alongside these.

And that is one that exists to carry out fraud. Academic Robert Tillman sums it up well in his 2002 book, Global Pirates, Fault in the Offshore Insurance Industry. Thrill a minute, which has a ton of fascinating stuff about these kind of scams. He likens the dominion of Melchizedek to the work of Herbert Williams, a.k.a. Little Bird on the Shoulder.

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who in the 1970s creates something called the Sovereign Cherokee Nation out of a sandbar in the middle of the Rio Grande. Williams claims his self-styled country has been made by a, quote, act of God, but his plans for it are a little less grounded in the divine. Basically, he wants to make his own tax haven.

I mean, who doesn't? But I just want to point out how much effort you put into these. You're basically writing a magazine feature here, and you do it like every other week. It's just insane, man. Yeah, I mean, my son will grow up without a father, but at least we've got the podcast, eh? This plays on the Rio Grande, this little sandbank. According to Tillman, it's taking, quote, offshore scams to the next logical step.

Rather than be independent upon foreign companies to issue them licenses for their phony insurance companies, banks, investment firms, why not create their own country and issue these licenses themselves? Moreover, once the country has been created, why not sell the licenses to others?

So, guys, are you getting the gist? Why not park cash in the Caymans when you can just create your own Caymans? And with it, all the fake diplomas and licenses and passports and other goodies you can print, including, in some cases, currency. And I can't say exactly how I got into this story because I'm about to kind of go report it. But this stuff is huge and it's happening all over the world. And having spent a week researching it, I've been pinging Danny on the WhatsApps trying to convince him we should do a Netflix show on him. Thoughts on that?

Yeah, we should just be getting paid at this point by a production house, just being in-house to come up with ideas. If you're out there, all of our IP, it's all for sale. Yeah, it's a good scam. Why not? Instead of actually doing the scam yourselves, just sell credentials to other people so they can scam. It makes a lot of sense.

Definitely. Yeah. I mean, if guys are out there looking for a Netflix show in which the main character has already called the reporter a, I think it was like a mendacious servant of the devil. Um, we're here, we're here and we're waiting. Um,

Anyway, there are several of these kind of micronations, right? The fraudy ones. The sovereign state of Aeon and Lucina. There's tons of them have these dense Latin names. All the guys who start them are either into the Bible or into weird papal shit, or they're just loners who spend entire days pouring over international law and Da Vinci code.

Ayrtona Lucina is an Australian one and it sells doctorates and honours for almost 20 years until the death of its quote Supreme Lord Paul Neumann a German migrant in the 90s there was new utopia a scratch of land in the Cayman Islands proclaimed by Howard Turney or as he preferred to be known Prince Lazarus which raised almost 100 million dollars for bogus investments and

I've left a link to it on the reading list. There's some real GeoCities era wonderfulness going on there. And like, God, isn't the internet boring these days? And then there is the Dominion of Melchizedek. And before I get into the crazy life of its founder, it's no coincidence that this thing ends up focused on the Pacific.

The region, this region where I currently am, is full of tiny states and others that are flung across thousands of nautical miles with vanishing populations and semi-existent government reach. Nauru, for example, has got an area of just 8 square miles and a population of under 11,000. A ton of these places have sovereignty disputes going way back before colonialism, then they were overrun during the Second World War, became US Air Force staging posts or Japanese satraps.

Uninhabited or irradiated by nuclear testing, just like Fangatofa Atoll or even Bikini Atoll in the Marshalls. It's all a bit of a mess. It's no surprise that Pacific nations are becoming vital transshipment points for cocaine and meth. Yeah, is that... What's the route here? Is it like South America to Australia? And I know cocaine is like $100 a gram there. It seems very profitable. Yeah, I think it's like...

cocaine here is about four to five hundred New Zealand dollars which is like three hundred US dollars or something like this and the prices are unbelievable so I think they are coming from South America and I'm trying to sort of dig into that a bit for a story further down the line but yeah like islands like Kiribati and Micronesia Micronesia is a country by the way guys and the Marshall Islands like they're just thousands of islands where no one lives there so they're just perfect you just drop off a big shipment of coke and leave it for a while and

Anyway, these places have been frequent targets also for Westerners wanting to establish their own nations. In 1873, an American named Albert B. Steinberger washes up on the shores of Samoa, a collection of islands in the Pacific Ocean claiming to be a, quote, special agent of the United States. Right away, he begins establishing himself as a country's leader.

In two years, Steinberger has appointed himself Premier and Chief Judge. He's written a constitution, including a law, by which he personally receives a chunk of all tax payments. Oh, and he kindly sanctions the use of a government yacht to himself. In a strange twist of contemporary colonialism, Steinberger is actually stopped when the Samoans enlist a crew of British sailors to capture and deport the American.

So, the Pacific knows these white-skinned chants as well. They may all seem laughable, but Tillman returns to a maxim of the American sociologist W.I. Thomas that, quote, if men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences.

which I guess you could stretch to pretty much any religion, organized or not. Brights Tillman quote, in the case of the dominion of Melchizedek, the fact that its existence as a legitimate country has always been in dispute has not prevented its self-proclaimed representatives from using its purported existence to engage not only in a wide variety of criminal activities, but political activities as well. And these activities have had very real consequences for others.

but we'll get to the Dominion's Pacific Island shenanigans later. Let's hop now back to 1990.

That's the year a 28-year-old Texas entrepreneur named Jeffrey Reynolds founds a company named California Pacific Bankers and Insurance Limited. Pretty okay. I mean, it claims to sell cut-price auto insurance, and it really is cut price. A large state provider might charge between a grand and 2.5K for a policy. California Pacific will do it for just under 500 bucks. Bit stinky.

In 1993, authorities shut the firm down, not just because it's not paying out, because of course it ain't, but because Reynolds claims to be the Secretary of Commerce for a country called, yes, the Dominion of Melchizedek, and his company's licenses have been issued there. Officials point out, quite rightly, that this country doesn't exist. Reynolds also claims that California Pacific has assets totaling $450 million, but regulators can't find a single one of them.

Furthermore, the company's financial statement has been audited by a DC firm whose headquarters is listed as, quote, Sir Francis Drake Financial Center, Malpelo Island, Dominion of Melchizedek, Mid-Pacific. Its mailing address, the same as the Dominion of Melchizedek's U.S. Embassy, a P.O. box.

California Pacific's employees include a man named Dallas Besson, a.k.a. Chief Wise Otter, while its London representative is a well-known scam artist by the name of Matthew Boner. That's his real name, no pseudonym required. I mean, I'm just thinking about how the only way to make insurance fraud interesting is to have a made-up country grifter doing it and to have the guy in charge be known as Mr. Boner.

I mean, we finally stumbled on the fraud story that everyone can get behind. This doesn't get any less weird. In 1996, Dallas officials charged Reynolds with fraud. Shock. But he snaps back that they don't have jurisdiction. This is, after all, a Dominion of Melchizedek affair, he tells them. And, by the way, here's a letter of recognition by none other than the proud government of the Central African Republic.

No matter that around half a percentage point of the average mid-Texan can point to the CIR on a map, it is definitely a real country. No, it is a real country. I spent a few weeks there. I made a documentary about the civil... I've been to their embassy in...

in D.C. get a visa when I was going there. It's real. Is that one of those embassies where it's just a flat above a flower shop? Actually, that literally is what the Burundian embassy is in Berlin. Yeah, it's kind of like that. I think it was like ground floor of a brownstone. But, you know, nice people. I'm sure. Going through a tough time. Yeah, you did some pretty amazing stuff there. There was like, what was it, Muslims, Christians, there was a horrible civil war going on there, right? It was political, but it diverged into...

religious conflict after a while but started off as a political conflict yeah we should put some of that stuff up on the reading list too it's really good nonetheless anyway Reynolds judge that Texan guy he just isn't buying it Reynolds is convicted and he's sentenced to 54 months in prison for the scheme

But Reynolds isn't alone. In 1994, a used car dealer named Leon Excalibur Hooten III, the third of the proud Excalibur Hooten clan, has three firms shut down in, yes, Texas, when complaints pour in that they're not paying out on bonds.

I mean, honestly, if you get a policy from a guy named Leon Excalibur Hooten III, come on, guys. When regulators peer inside Hooten's network, everything leads to a dead end. Companies that don't exist, bonds conjured out of thin air, everything is bogus. Hooten's main firm, Lifeguard Reinsurance, lists $15 million in deposits from Asia Pacific Bank and $20 million in bonds from St. Charles University in De Quincey, Louisiana.

So you think he'd be good for the debt. But the St. Charles University president, Putin, and Asia Pacific Bank, well, that's charted by, yes, the dominion of Melchizedek. Operating out of California by a Manila-born woman whose life we are going to dive into on the second part of this show in a very big way.

Hooten, who's already been in trouble in the 80s for a scam involving an Oklahoma religious TV show and a prepaid dental plan. We're not going to go there. The top line's good enough. He said he's undergone a religious conversion to Mormonism and he's already tried and failed to launch drug rehab clinics across Texas. He also claims to be the former president of the Dominion of Melchizedek before dying in 1996. Although even Hooten's ex-wife says she thinks he's faked it.

Wait, so just to be clear, because I think some people might get a little lost. Basically, all the people you're mentioning now are scam artists, but they basically have scammed by getting documents from the Dominion of Melchizedek, right?

Yeah, yeah. So this is what we mean by it being like a mothership for scam artists and con men all around. I mean, it's the States at this point, but it's going to become wider. So they're just all picking up these fake licenses and diplomas and saying they're the president of what and what university and it's all linked to this dominion.

So I really thought you were going to jump in with a joke about faking it then, but never mind. Anyway, what have authorities stumbled on here? Well, it's something that's actually started over a decade previous, but incredibly, so far, it had managed to fly under the radar. Now, the story of the Dominion of Melchizedek actually begins back in 1982. That

That year, David Pedley and his son Mark are convicted for a series of fraudulent land deals in Placerville, California, which is near Sacramento.

While awaiting trial, however, the father-son pair abscond and hot-step it across the Mexican border. According to official Dominion records, quote, during their sojourn to Mexico, David and Mark founded a Saipan Class A bank that helped Mexicans convert fast-devaluating pesos into more than 8.8 million in U.S. dollars.

That's Saipan, by the way, the capital and largest of the Northern Mariana Islands, a Pacific colony of the US, north of Guam and the Federated States of Micronesia. But you guys knew that already, didn't you? What a lovely altruistic business. In fact, the Pedleys have scammed holders of pesos out of an estimated $6 million and a Boston court sentences them to eight years prison and a 25 grand fine.

Mark Pedley, the son, is then arrested by Mexican officials for not renewing his visa permit, which, given all the other crazy fraud shit he's into, that is pretty dumb. And he's deported to the US. Here's that SF Weekly report again on the Pedleys. Quote, the pair perpetrated various acts of fraud in mystical symbiosis, sporting matching Nazarene-style beards and long flowing hair.

They created their own version of the Bible, a cribbing of the King James translation embroidered with idiosyncratic metaphysics. In the so-called Melchizedekian Bible, sorry guys, that is such a horrible word, the Holy Ghost is referred to as the quote scientific being. I mean, I reckon you really got to watch out for the guys growing their beards along and writing their own versions of the Bible while inside, like keep them in the yard, make them shoot hoops and bench 250, whittle down pencils or some shit.

But the Melchizedekian Bible is the word as quote metaphorically translated by the Pedleys. Only God reveals Numenon and Phenomenon says it's Genesis 1.1, which I studied theology and that doesn't even make sense. It also appears to have been copied pretty heavily from a Hollywood faith leader of the time.

That's a great job, Hollywood faith healer. I feel like good industry to get into, recession-proof, money to be made. Yeah, evergreen, evergreen. Briefly then, who is Melchizedek? Well, very briefly, his name literally means, quote, king of righteousness. And he barely pops up in scripture, but he's a prominent figure. In the Bible, he rules over the city of Salem, which is Jerusalem, which is obviously a pretty big deal. He offers bread and wine to Abraham after victory in battle, and he gets a massive tithe back.

The biggest dildo for the Gnostics and millenarians who've put Melchizedek on a pedestal for centuries is that in the New Testament, he's elevated to a kind of Christ figure, having no father or mother and quote, resembling the son of God and remaining a priest, quote, forever. So you could see why the crazies love him.

But the most important detail of this new text that the father and son write is that it's priced at a bargain $24 for potential believers, which in today's money is a cool 75 bucks. David Pedley, the elder Pedley, he dies in prison while fighting extradition to the United States and copyright for the Melchizedekian Bible, ah, I did it right, falls to Mark. The FBI actually shows up to David Pedley's funeral to make sure he's dead and to fingerprint the corpse,

But Mark refuses to let them, and the family cremates the coffin before the agents can get a court order. A number of law enforcement agencies have since suggested that David actually bribed Mexican prison officials to fake his own death and stage a bogus funeral. And there have been several alleged sightings, very credible ones, including one in January 1999 in San Francisco, close to Mark's own residence.

Eventually, Mark is released from Washington's Walla Walla State Penitentiary and on the ride home, he has a quote revelation to be named Branch Vinedresser. This comes from a verse from John 15, quote, I am the vine and my father is the vinedresser, which, all right, Mark, you're carrying a torture old man, we get it.

Part of this revealed wisdom is that Marx had found his own country. In 1990, the dominion of Melchizedek is born, and the carousel of crazy frauds like those of Jeffrey Reynolds and Leon Excalibur, blah, blah, blah, whatever his name is, kicks into gear. Writes the Washington Post, quote, based more on tax laws than territory, Melchizedek may be the ultimate postmodern state. It appears to exist mainly so that money can be whisked through shell banks.

It calls to mind the prophecy issued in the movie Network that in the future corporations would replace nations. It even has elements of performance art. Invent your own country for fun and profit. Let a thousand branch vine dressers bloom. I really recommend you read the reading list for this one, guys, because there's some really cool stories. Like 1990s American features are fucking shit hot. There are more.

In 1995, a rakish Austrian calling himself, quote, Crown Prince Gerald Dennis Sain Wittgenstein Hohenstein of Melchizedek, he strolls into a Hong Kong bank and successfully deposits a check, drawn on a bank in Melchizedek, of course, for $318,000. That is a lot of cash.

Cop snatches holiness, who turns out to be an unemployed 22-year-old baker whose real name is Gerhard Bacher, who spent the lion's share of the past month sleeping in the terminal of Kai Tak Airport, as do so many European royals.

It turns out this guy has been hopping all over Asia on a Melchizedek, quote, diplomatic passport. And he even has letters from Singapore and Malaysia saying that he can actually visit them. He has no such luck in Hong Kong, however. A court rejects his request for diplomatic immunity and appeals that he's just playing a big fat prank, all flat on their ass, quote,

A fraud on the banking system in Hong Kong is a very serious business, one magistrate tells him, before sentencing him to a lengthy prison term. So this guy, he wasn't involved with the Pethys, right? He's just some rando who paid them for documents? From what I read, because this stuff is like early internet era, he paid them for documents, but he was also speaking to them. So they're kind of like...

They're kind of like a club and a scamming circle. They do seem to know each other. And even though I've been sort of challenged on this by the guy who currently runs it, who seems to have a massive issue with Wikipedia, even though I told him it would be like Harry Carey to look at Wikipedia as a journalist, all of the stuff that he denies checks out under the most tiniest of scrutiny. So yeah, they're like...

They are a club. They're a group of so-called diplomats running around trying to scam everyone. They do know each other and the peddlies are at the top of the whole thing.

So Mark Pedley, the younger Pedley, sorry, branch vine dresser. He has by now, by this point, changed his name officially to Simak Ben David Netzer Korim. I'm trying to do the right like Hebrew. And he shacked up with a Manila born divorcee called Elvira Gamboa.

They are a match made in con artistry heaven. Gamboa has already been dipping her toes in mining concerns and pretty weird ones at that that we'll get to later on. They share a love of the divine too, but more importantly, a love of cash. And they get to work setting up a homeland for the faithful that will duke from the mad to the magnificent. Meanwhile, the Dominion related crimes just keep pouring in. Here's a cracked piece from last year. Quote,

At some point in the mid-90s, a man called John Gillespie arrived in the Philippines, calling himself the Minister of Foreign Affairs for the Dominion of Melchizedek. Gillespie and his accomplices were promoting a supposed citizenship by investment scheme where Filipinos could acquire Dominion passports in exchange for a one-time payment of $3,500.

Many impoverished Filipinos parted with their life savings in the belief that their new passports would allow them to find lucrative work in America. And it continues, quote, others paid thousands in processing fees to apply for a government job in the Dominion itself, which was supposedly a wealthy country in the South Pacific. In reality, the Dominion was, of course, the fictional country dreamed up by Mark Pedley slash Branch Feindresser on that bus years earlier.

And Gillespie was hardly an experienced diplomat. In fact, he was a lifelong scammer who had fled Australia after serving a prison sentence for carrying out the country's most notorious horse makeover. Yeah, a horse makeover. After he was released from prison, Gillespie joins the Dominion's government. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. What is a horse makeover? You can't just move on and not explain what that is.

So I read a little bit about this. I thought, God, there's so many tangents on this show already. But I think he was involved in like spray painting of a racehorse and making it race other races or something like this. And he basically passed off a really good horse as a crap horse and pwned a load of people on the betting money. It's really quite well known in Australia apparently, but it's pretty nuts. Again, I've left links to it, but...

My God, there's a lot of stuff going on here. Fine dresser, by the way, at this point, he's back in the States running a company called currency with the sea bit like the ocean. Get it. It's a bit sort of like, you know, Valley tech company name.

This claims to own 10% of the world's seas, which is obviously legit. His plan is to use it as a vehicle for a so-called pump and dump penny stock scheme. So think of Wolf of Wall Street and kind of Field of Dreams with a scraggly haired Jesus figure at the helm. This kind of thing is where you take a shit penny stock company, pump its price by issuing a bunch of like fake PRs or just telling your friends that

And then you dump the stock when the tiny amount is worth per share doubles or triples or whatever. I mean, to be honest, if I was ever going to do crime, I think this is what I'd do. At one point, currency has a whopping $500 million market cap, although it quickly snaps down to almost nothing. Man, it's a shame these guys didn't wait for crypto. I feel like they could have made tens of millions and gotten away with it.

Yeah, I mean, this is essentially what crypto is, right? I mean, I might be, I don't know, oversimplifying it, but it's pretty much what most coins I've seen are. Anyway, with that venture toppling, don't send me emails about that, guys. I'm not going to read them. Fine dresser tries mint in his own currency, which he says is backed by $400 million in platinum, only one bar of which is shappy to show off at a time.

He gets, quote, equi-currency listed in the financial pages of the International Herald Tribune with a total value of $10 billion. He also rents a Bloomberg terminal and lists it there. Writes Tillman, quote, thus, with a wave of his financial wand, Bindretta had created billions in assets for his mythical country. I mean, this guy is actually pretty fucking sharp, and I think he deserves our respect.

Yeah, I'm not denying it. You don't write your own Bible and make your own country without a bit of now say. With the advent of the internet, this new country basically becomes a kind of scammy Agora or something awful, you know, those great early forum sites with Dominion aspirants checking in online for everything from amendments to the constitution to updates on leadership and ecclesiastical pontifications from its house of elders, which I guess is the Dominion's upper house.

No wonder con men come flocking in. Tons of companies share the Dominion's U.S. Embassy address, the P.O. Box. The embassy itself is just an answering phone that forwards calls to Vinedresser in California.

One of the Dominion followers at this time is a Las Vegas guy named Fred Cruz, who claims in the late 90s that his company owns $27 million worth of gold ore, which is really just a pile of dirt in a California warehouse, and $2.7 billion in assets, notes, and currency from, yeah, of course, the Dominion. Isn't Ted Cruz's dad called Fred Cruz? I don't know.

Cruise and his firm Countryland gets deeper in trouble when it attempts to buy fellow Vegas outfit Jackpot Enterprise Inc.'s casino slot machine business, backed by this alleged Dominion cash, of course, making Cruise's Vegas firm's stock jump suddenly. There's the pump and dump. And early investors get rich, obviously, from manipulated shares.

Another Melchizedek associate, or perhaps graduate, is an American called Gilbert Ziegler, who enters Grenada on a Dominion passport in 1997 before getting a $20 million line of credit by showing authorities a picture of a ruby he says he owns. Not the ruby, the picture of the ruby.

Pretty soon, Ziegler is running a weird combo hotel and Ponzi scheme, scamming folks with promised returns of 300% for their investment, and he ends up getting $140 million.

And then he flees to Uganda, of course, lives in luxury in Idi Amin's former mansion under the name Van A Brink, of course, and then he's arrested in a bloody shootout with Ugandan cops, gets extradited back to the UK, and dies in prison awaiting trials. Jesus, every single one of these guys is like a movie.

Yeah, this is what I'm telling you. This is why I've been pinging you on the fucking WhatsApps. This is amazing. We could just like do every single one. It's incredible. I mean, there's tons of these guys that I've left so much out. There's a Brit who establishes a fake Native American reservation, for example, something my Rolling Stone guy may or may not have done, too. I hope the lawyers are fine with that. And that is nuts. I really wonder if he knew these folks.

Here's an offshore alert report, quote, as alleged frauds, it would be hard to conceive of anything more audacious than creating your own phony country, promoting it as a major offshore financial center and charging people for banks and insurance licenses, IBCs, trusts and even bar qualifications.

And why not throw in an international stock exchange with several listings of fake companies with fake trading all displayed on an elaborate website? Well, quite. But of course, at this point, the dominion of Melchizedek is just a California townhouse and an answering machine. Buying dressers revelation was clear. He needs land. What do we always say here? Get into real estate.

Branch Reindresser, Mark Pedley, and his new beau, Elvira Gamboa, are going to take that maxim to insane new heights. In part two of this show, the Dominion is going to truly go global, and it's going to come knocking on my door. Yeah, I mean, I hope you have your lawyers on retainer. I don't. Great. All the more reason for you guys to go to patreon.com slash the underworld podcast or sign up on iTunes. Until next week. Thanks, Sean. Cheers.

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