In a recent interview on Reality Life with Kate Casey, Nancy Salzman said of Keith Raniere:
“NXIVM was a name he created… There were other companies that were created under what we called the NXIVM umbrella. They also had names.”
I made a list of more than a hundred companies he named. I shared my list with the US Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of NY, which had its own list.
He had marvelous names, whimsical names, serious names, names that meant something, and names that meant nothing. If he’d taken a walk in Knox Woods, he’d have named the squirrels, filed the paperwork, and convinced his followers that they were part of a revolutionary ethical framework. Most were shell companies.
MK10ART: He was good at branding.
Names With Meaning
Keith thought names were magic spells. Maybe they were. When you’re the world’s smartest man, you don’t pick names by accident. If he named a sandwich “The International Academy of Ethical Human Potential,” it’s no longer just a sandwich.
There are sly secrets inside them, meant to be admired but never understood by his followers basking in his reflected glow. He hid little messages inside them, like fortune cookies written by a narcissist. The man named companies the way kids name goldfish.
Alpha-Beta-Cal Order
So let’s begin our list of company names in alphabetical order.
ACK Knowledge, LLC
ACK stands for Alex, Clare, and Keith, and stands presumably for the collective knowledge that trio possesses and wished to share with the world.
ACK Management PTE LTD.
The abbreviation “PTE” stands for “Private” (as part of “Private Limited”). PTE is common in Singapore but not likely anywhere else.
ACK Wakaya Holdings LLC
This is the company that owns the Wakaya Resort property in Fiji. The property takes up about 80 percent of Wakaya Island.
Wakaya Island.
Mk10 ART
Aletheia LLC
Aletheia (ἀλήθεια in Greek) means “truth” as in discovering the truth, or “disclosure” or “unconcealment” or “unveiling.” The trial of Keith Raniere revealed many disclosures about his concealments. The name is spot on.
Alousch, LLC:
I have no idea what this means. But it does rhyme with couch or ouch, depending on how gently you fall on it. Or grouch. Either way, he was clearly no slouch when it came to forming Alousch, LLC.
Alpha Development Group, LLC
The word alpha (άλφα) comes from ancient Greek. It was the first letter — not just in the alphabet, but in their sense of the world. To write Alpha was to begin. It sets things in motion. Philosophers used it to mark the primary cause, the first principle (another company of Keith’s, which we will get to in alphabetical order).
In the Book of Revelation, God is called the Alpha and the Omega — the first and the last with jurisdiction over everything in between.
In modern life, Alpha means “the leader,” “the dominant one,” often claimed by men who would have puzzled the Greeks, amused the Romans, and been quickly dispatched by the Vikings.
In the beginning, there was Keith Raniere, who chose a word the ancient Greeks once used to mark the dawn of things: He named the company Alpha Development Group, suggesting that something vast, something essential, something really big was starting here. A man who wishedto begin everything with himself was attempting to give glory to humanity’s oldest letter and contemporaneously its greatest man. Yes, himself, for a limited liability company, in and of itself, as any bookkeeper will tell you, is not the source of all beginnings.
This, of course, is the genius of Raniere. He always had a two-fold purpose: Giving shell companies glorious names, when simple tax evasion was his main purpose. They once called him the Alpha Dog — a title bestowed by the Society of Protectors (another great name and not a shell company at all).
Structures small in scope, names enormous in ambition, and a leader who believed he stood at the beginning of all things. Every system starts somewhere. The Greeks began with Alpha. So did he.
His Omega Moment
To show how his Alpha “developed,” let us turn to a moment on March 25, 2018. The venue is a luxurious seaside villa in a fishing village near Puerto Vallarta, Mexico.
Casa Chocolate, the Mexican villa where Raniere spent his last hours of freedom.
There was a planned group blow job that day, whereby Lauren and other women were going to do the blowing, and one gorgeous Vanguard was going to provide the singular object to be jointly pleasured. But it did not come off. The women and Keith had moved into the villa that day. Keith was not feeling well, and before he could even get it up, a sad event occurred.
Lauren described it at trial, and here is what she testified, [slightly edited for clarity.]
MK10ART’s painting of Lauren Salzman
Lauren’s Testimony:
“We (Keith and she) had lain down and taken a nap, and when we woke up, he wasn’t feeling well …(he) asked if I would bring him some food. I went to the kitchen and I brought him some food. I went back to the kitchen to make myself a smoothie, and Loreta came running into the kitchen and said the police are at the door, they’re here for Keith.
“I ran immediately to Keith’s room and closed us in, and tried to protect Keith. I said, “You need to leave,” and I wanted him to go out a window.
“He didn’t do that; he told me to call Jack, a mutual friend. I didn’t have a phone, and I didn’t know how to work his phone. He was on the phone trying to call Jack, and I went into one mode: protecting Keith. I locked the doors and closed the blinds. I could see outside the window that federal police with machine guns and bulletproof vests, some wearing masks, were surrounding the property.
“They searched the whole property until they found the room we were in, and they came banging on the door Keith said, ‘ask them if they have a warrant,’ and then he disappeared into the walk-in closet.
“I went to the door and asked them if they had a warrant, and they said, ‘open the door and we’ll show it to you.’
“I said, ‘if you show it to me, I’ll open the door.’
“We went back and forth a few times. They asked me if there were any other people with me and if we had weapons. I kept thinking they could just shoot through this door, and so I kept walking away from the door, then going back to talk to them, but I kept considering that, legitimately, I might get shot right now, but I kept interacting with them because my higher priority was making sure that Keith was okay.
“Eventually, they kicked down the door and held me on the floor with four machine guns pointed at me and asked me if ‘is there anybody else in here with you, are you alone? Who else is here?’
“I wasn’t answering them. I expected they would start becoming aggressive. I thought they were going to kick me, and when I thought that was going to happen, I called out Keith’s name. At the same time, in the walk-in closet that he was in, there was a door on the other side, and they were kicking down the door on that side. I wasn’t aware of that then, so I called out his name, and then he came out of the room.
“I hadn’t been strong enough not to call out his name. I didn’t have the character to just protect him at all costs.
“They put him on the floor, too. They handcuffed him, and then they let him stand up and let him see the piece of paper, and he called out to me what the allegations were, that they were out of the Eastern District of New York, that he was being accused of sex trafficking, and then they took him.
“For months after that, I always felt like I was such a failure. I had let him down.
“Everything we had done, everything that I was teaching in NXIVM, everything that I believed that I was learning in Jness and SOP and everything that I joined DOS to build all centered around the fact that we can live this principled life and that the highest principles that you can live are principles of love and love is when you do something lovingly without getting anything back and that you can die in many ways in your life but dying for a principle is the most noble thing that you could do.
“I had always wondered if, in a moment where there was a life or death situation, would I be able to uphold my principles or would I be a coward? Would I forget and choose myself over somebody else? This was the most life-or-death situation that I was in. They didn’t hurt me, but I considered that they might.
“I chose what I believed we had been training for this entire time, which was to choose love over everything, including the possibility of losing my life, and it never crossed my mind that if Keith and I were in the situation that he wouldn’t choose the exact same thing. It never occurred to me that I would choose Keith, and that Keith would choose Keith, because they were there for Keith. They weren’t there for me. We all knew they were there for Keith, so there was no need to send me to shield him or negotiate with them. He could have protected all of us and just gone if he was not going to go out the window.
“Why would he do that? It was shocking, and then I put it aside, beat myself up over my lack of character, and spent the next three months focusing on how to help Keith, but when I was indicted and I had three months very alone, with a lot of time to think, it was one of the things I just kept going back to.
“Everything he taught us was this: Society of Protectors; this is what men are; this is what men do; this is what is noble; this is what women don’t do; this is what women can’t do, and then he didn’t do it and I did it, and I could not make sense of how that could even be in any universe where he was who I believed he was.”
Alpha Development, LLC. Yes, there are many great names to get to, and we haven’t even gotten through the A’s yet. With all this Alpha greatness, we had better stop here before we get to Applied Principles, Axiology, Inc., and of course, the dulcet and exciting sounds produced by his very musical company, a Capella Innovations, LLC.
Stay tuned for Part 2.
