As the Attorney General’s Office stonewalled the Committee, and the OPD,
NSP, and FBI declared that the King-related child-abuse allegations had “no
substance,” a number of Omaha’s citizenry looked on with shock and
disbelief, because talk of King-related child abuse had drifted throughout
their community for years, and the closing of Franklin only served to
intensify the innuendo. By the summer of 1989, eddies of Nebraska’s
populace who had lost faith in their local, state, and federal institutions of
government’s ability to protect the community’s children took it upon
themselves to form a group called Concerned Parents. Initially, Concerned
Parents met at an Omaha church, and it attracted only a trickle of members.
But as the cover-up of King’s activities intensified, its ranks started to swell.
Bonnie Cosentino was a co-founder of Concerned Parents. The forty-year-
old Cosentino was the soft-spoken single mother of a twelve-year-old boy.
Cosentino designed and constructed team mascots for a living—the life-
sized mascots that are spotted running around college and professional
sporting events, enthusing fans. She had heard of King’s harem of boys
since the early 1970s; so the allegations didn’t surprise her, but she was
sickened and dismayed by law enforcement’s response.
“We had heard on numerous occasions about young people who had dared
to go to law enforcement with the allegations, and they would simply be
laughed at,” Cosentino told me. “If you’re fourteen years old and you can’t
trust law enforcement, who can you trust—it’s like the fire extinguisher was
on fire.”
Concerned Parents sought to provide a “constructive” voice for the victims
and to investigate their allegations, because of law enforcement’s
unwillingness to act. Concerned Parents also acted as a support network for
adults who had become bewildered and furious that the child-abuse
allegations were receiving such scant attention from the authorities.
Cosentino’s role as an organizer for the disenchanted singled her out for a
campaign of terror. One day she and her son were crossing the street when
an approaching car sped up and sideswiped them—a bomb was also
detonated in her backyard. She, too, started to receive life-threatening phone
calls.
“There were several people who ran Concerned Parents so one person
wasn’t on the front lines all the time,” said Cosentino, “because it was clear
that whoever took a stand would be subjected to retaliation, or their families
would be subjected to retaliation. Our lives were turned upside down by
fear. We felt that our phones were tapped, so just ordinary day-to-day
routines like talking on the phone took on a new meaning.”
