Father Bud's Boys Farm

Boys Farm, Inc., known as Father Bud's Boys Farm, was founded in 1971 by the Rev. Claudius Vermilye, formerly rector of the Episcopal church at Alto, Tennessee, as a rehabilitation center for wayward boys in the Roarks Cove community near Alto; national wire reports placed it at Winchester and the investigator Kenneth Wooden at Monteagle. The boys were sent there by the state correction department, juvenile authorities and welfare agencies, and the farm was partly financed with state and county funds.¹²³⁴

Films found on the Michigan photographer Gerald Richards at his arrest in July 1976 and films seized in the New Orleans raid on Troop 137 led Tennessee authorities to raid the farm after they recognized some of the "actors"; Vermilye's name had also turned up in the files of the New Orleans scoutmaster Richard Halvorsen. The raid produced films of sexual acts between boys at the farm and a list of more than 270 "active sponsors," among them Francis Shelden, owner of North Fox Island. District Attorney General J. William Pope said the boys were shown obscene films and given liquor before orgies filmed with a hidden camera, that films were sold to sponsors to raise money for the farm, and that some sponsors came to the farm to have sex with the boys. Half a dozen Illinois men had bought films from Vermilye, one for more than 4,000 dollars. Richards testified that the farm "sold raw film to other men. They would bring it to me to process." An investigator for the district attorney general, Pete Bouldin, described the Church of the New Revelation, one of the network's fronts, as a "referral agency which distributes pornography around the country"; Boys Farm, Inc., was listed as a separate organization from the church. Vermilye was convicted on June 3, 1977.¹²³⁵

The Distribution Network

The writer S. Dovey wrote that film was mailed from the farm to Richards for development and distribution through MAIL-O-MATIC in North Carolina and F&S Distributors in California. Dovey also wrote that the farm was raided on November 10, 1976, and reported the next day by the Detroit Free Press as a national pornography hub, and that it was incorporated under the Church of the New Revelation, through which it was linked to Dyer Grossman and Adam Starchild, and connected through a letter from Vermilye to Halvorsen with Troop 137 and with the Chicago network of John David Norman, the Delta Project and the Odyssey Network.⁶